facebook spying on us?

[nicholas.hatch at gmail.com (nick hatch)]

On Thu, Sep 29, 2011 at 8:13 AM, Glen Kent <glen.kent at gmail.com> wrote:

> I also wonder about the kind of servers facebook must be having to be
> able to manage millions of TCP connections that must be terminating
> there.
>

For what it's worth, with some kernel tuning you can maintain 500k - 1MM
persistent connections on a mid-range Linux box. Providers of mobile
push-notification services seem to be the ones most actively pushing these
limits publicly.

Urban Airship has posted some information on how they maintain 500k
connections on EC2 m1.large instances:
http://urbanairship.com/blog/2010/08/24/c500k-in-action-at-urban-airship/
http://urbanairship.com/blog/2010/09/29/linux-kernel-tuning-for-c500k/

WhatsApp claim to be able to maintain 1MM connections on single machine,
although details are thin:
http://blog.whatsapp.com/index.php/2011/09/one-million/
http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3028547 (discussion)

-n