Breaking the 10,000 RTMP connection limit - WebORB Mach 3

We have been running scalability tests for the Enterprise Edition of WebORB. We started with a simple setup - multiple RTMP clients on the same computer as the WebORB server. Even though the setup is not representative of a real-world scenario, it is good to see the server operating in a more stringent environment where the resources are shared. This pushes us to come up with a better server solution which is not hungry for memory and CPU.

Shortly into the test we ran into an interesting limitation where new connections would be rejected at 3976 concurrent connections. Turns out Windows allows ports 1024-5000 for the short-lived TCP-IP connections by default. The difference between these numbers is 3976! Fortunately there is a way to overcome that limitation. There is a KB article on the Microsoft's site describing the solution.

Once we increased the limit, the server could easily reach the goal we have established internally - 10,000 concurrent RTMP connections. The next step is to calculate how multiple connections correlate to the performance overhead and add a monitoring panel to our Management Console.

Technorati tags: WebORB, RTMP, Flash messaging