Max Win2k Pro TCP/IP connections???

[Bill]

It is my understanding that the Win2k Pro license limits the number of
connections, including TCP/IP connections to 5. Can someone point me
to a reference on-line that confirms this one way or another? I have
not been able to find anything.

Thanks,

Bill

 

[Colon Terminus]

Hi Bill,

The number of simultaneous connections to a Win2K Pro box is 10. This is
hard coded into the O/S and can't be overcome. The connection limit applies
to physical connections to printers, shares, etc. As far as TCP/IP
connections, I'm not sure what you mean. If you wanna use Win2K Pro as a web
server, then the only limitations as far as connections go is the license
agreement and yhour conscience. Win2K Pro by itself doesn't care how many
TCP/IP connections it has ... it imposes no limitations.

 

[Vanguard]

See Microsoft's KB article # 122920, "Inbound Connections Limit in
Windows" (also mentions unlimited outbound connections). That only
discusses the limitations in Windows, not in Internet Explorer. IE has
a limit of 5 concurrent sessions. You can have more than 5 instances of
IE loaded but only 5 will be allowed traffic concurrently. I remember
having to use Netscape browser for some testing when more than 5
concurrent AND active sessions were needed; Netscape allows up to 64 (or
it did back when I needed to use it for testing). It now appears that
IE has lowered that to only 2 simultaneous active connections; see
Microsoft's KB article # 282402, "How to Configure Internet Explorer to
Have More Than Two Download Sessions". Anything over 2 concurrent
sessions violates RFC 2068. Some sites will limit you to the max of 2
to 5 concurrent connections (from the same IP address) to prevent your
abuse of their network with multiple downloads. I haven't used Netscape
for awhile but at that time it did violate this RFC and allowed more
than 2 simultaneous connections. That doesn't mean that you are limited
to just 2 instances of the browser loaded at the same time.

Actually what RFC 2068 says is:

"Clients that use persistent connections SHOULD limit the number of
simultaneous connections that they maintain to a given server. A
single-user client SHOULD maintain AT MOST 2 connections with any server
or proxy. A proxy SHOULD use up to 2*N connections to another server or
proxy, where N is the number of simultaneously active users. These
guidelines are intended to improve HTTP response times and avoid
congestion of the Internet or other networks."

Note it is "SHOULD" and not "MUST". This is a recommendation, not a
requirement to be RFC 2068 compliant. Although it makes the RFC look
weak, it leaves it open to the network to decide how many concurrent
sessions it will allow from the same IP address. This also applies only
to persistent (HTTP 1.1) connections.