I'm running on Mac OS X right now. Theerkla's correct- the sockets are file descriptors and there's a setting to up the default from, I believe, 512. Supposedly the default is dynamically upped when more sockets are requested, but I've not gotten my server to handle more than a hard limit of ~500. No worries though, this is plenty for now so I haven't forced the issue.

And yep Isildur, my whole world starts slowing down when I reach the limits so I'm keeping it under 500 until if and when I need to boost my hardware/code to accomodate. It's a CPU cycle bottleneck with some 500 threads going on (i.e. my application/hardware) not a socket issue, per se. So at the end of the day I've got a strong feeling that my code/hardware's going to be the limiting factor, not the socket limitations..as you warned. I'm happy with that.

Thanks!

(still curious how many connections CF could handle though, har).