IPFW + BRIDGE: network capacity question

[Mark Terribile]

Christopher Schulte writes:

> ...  I have an Intel D815EGEW board with a single PIII 1GHZ, ...
> Assume that it will be processing at peak all of this at once:
> 	500 TCP connections with long lived sessions ...
> 	500 UDP 'connections'
> 	500 web (HTTP port 80 tcp) connections per second (graphics,
>       small html pages)
> 		The HTTP sessions will be short lived, so lots of TCP
> handshakes at *least* a good portion will not utilize persistant HTTP

It's been a while since I was inside HTTP, but you may have a problem.

When the remote end drops a TCP connection, you may re-use the port
immediately.  When you drop it, the protocol stack on your side must
wait 120 seconds (check the number!) before reusing that port number.
If you try to drop and re-use 500 connections per second, you will
run into this as there are only 65536 ports per address, and some of
them are reserved or wired down.

Someone else please check me on this.

                                            Mark Terribile

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