massive tcp servers

[Dustin Sallings]

On Jun 24, 2004, at 2:34, Luke Gorrie wrote:

> Oh, oh, oh, that sounds like fun!

	Yeah, I think this project is a really stupid idea, but it's a 
fascinating problem.  :)

> I'm assuming that most of these users will be idle most of the time,
> and each will use a small amount of overall bandwidth.

	Yep.

> Entering fantasy land here..
>
> My first thought is that the OS will have trouble with that many
> connections. I'm not certain of the per-connection overhead, but
> looking at the 'tcp_opt' struct in include/linux/tcp.h at least it
> looks significant.

	Yep, (although I was thinking about using FreeBSD or something).  Does 
erlang use /dev/poll?

> If you wrote your own TCP (or simpler custom protocol) in userspace
> then maybe you could pull it off with just one box. You could keep the
> TCP control structures in a database on disk and map the active ones
> into a large-but-bounded-size pool in memory.

	That is just completely amazing.  It seems like the obvious and likely 
only solution to the problem.  You've given me a lot to think about.  
Thanks a lot.

--
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