Jorge Amodio (jmamodio) writes: > you have only 16-bits for port numbers.
65k port numbers != number of connections. The number of open connections (if we're talking TCP) is limited by the number of max file descriptors in the kernel (fs.file_max). See also: http://www.network-builders.com/maximum-simultaneous-network-connections-t56317.html You could have hundreds of thousands of connections to the same (destination IP, destination port). In practice, there are other limitations: http://www.kegel.com/c10k.html is good reading, even though it is a few years old.