What is the theoretical maximum number of open TCP connections that a modern Linux box can have

Assuming infinite performance from hardware, can a Linux box support >65536 open TCP connections?

I understand that the number of ephemeral ports (<65536) limits the number of connections from one local IP to one port on one remote IP.

The tuple (local ip, local port, remote ip, remote port) is what uniquely defines a TCP connection; does this imply that more than 65K connections can be supported if more than one of these parameters are free. e.g. connections to a single port number on multiple remote hosts from multiple local IPs.

Is there another 16 bit limit in the system? Number of file descriptors perhaps?

A single listening port can accept more than one connection simultaneously.

There is a '64K' limit that is often cited, but that is per client per server port, and needs clarifying.

Each TCP/IP packet has basically four fields for addressing. These are:

source_ip source_port destination_ip destination_port
<----- client ------> <--------- server ------------>

Inside the TCP stack, these four fields are used as a compound key to match up packets to connections (e.g. file descriptors).

If a client has many connections to the same port on the same destination, then three of those fields will be the same - only source_port varies to differentiate the different connections. Ports are 16-bit numbers, therefore the maximum number of connections any given client can have to any given host port is 64K.

However, multiple clients can each have up to 64K connections to some server's port, and if the server has multiple ports or either is multi-homed then you can multiply that further.

So the real limit is file descriptors. Each individual socket connection is given a file descriptor, so the limit is really the number of file descriptors that the system has been configured to allow and resources to handle. The maximum limit is typically up over 300K, but is configurable e.g. with sysctl.

The realistic limits being boasted about for normal boxes are around 80K for example single threaded Jabber messaging servers.

If you are thinking of running a server and trying to decide how many connections can be served from one machine, you may want to read about the C10k problem and the potential problems involved in serving lots of clients simultaneously.

If you used a raw socket (SOCK_RAW) and re-implemented TCP in userland, I think the answer is limited in this case only by the number of (local address, source port, destination address, destination port) tuples (~2^64 per local address).

It would of course take a lot of memory to keep the state of all those connections, and I think you would have to set up some iptables rules to keep the kernel TCP stack from getting upset &/or responding on your behalf.