networking - What is the upper limit on the number of open sockets I can have in Windows Server 2003

Question

I'm building a chat server with .NET. I have tried opening about 2000 client connections and my Linksys WRT54GL router (with tomato firmware) drops dead each time. The same thing happens when I have several connections open on my Azureus bit-torrent client.

I have three questions:

1. Is there a limit on the number of open sockets I can have in Windows Server 2003?
2. Is the Linksys router the problem? If so is there better hardware recommended?
3. Is there a way to possibly share sockets so that I can handle more open client connections with fewer resources?

Answer 1

i have found some answers to this that i feel i should share:

Windows 2003 server has a limit on the number of ports that may be used. but this is configurable via a registry tweak to change the MaxUSerPort setting from 5000 to say, 64k( max).

Exploring further, i realize that the 64k port restriction is actually per IP address, hence a single server can easily attain much more ports, and hence TCP connections by either installing multiple network cards, or binding more than one IP address to a network card. that way, you can scale your system to handle n x 64k ports.