sysctl kern.ipc.somaxconn limit 65535 why?

[Chuck Swiger]

On Jan 4, 2012, at 1:03 PM, Dan The Man wrote:
>> However, I'm not convinced that it is useful to do this.  At some point, you are better off timing out and retrying via exponential backoff than you are queuing hundreds of thousands of connections in the hopes that they will eventually be serviced by something sometime considerably later.
> 
> I agree completely, in practical application this makes sense, but why should the OS dictate not being able to temporarily set that setting higher in order to fully benchmark the application at 100k+ in the listen queue if the developer so chooses? I think that alone should be a good reason, to make freebsd developer friendly.

The job of the OS is to manage resources on behalf of the users and processes using the system.

Some developers feel that VM means that the system should always claim have more memory available, but always saying "yes" isn't "managing resources".  I'd rather have the OS return a null pointer and set ENOMEM when someone tries to malloc() more memory than the system (including swap, VM overcommit, etc) has, and I expect developers to code well enough to handle malloc() failures.

Setting the listen queue to an arbitrarily high value isn't useful, and developers would be better advised to pay attention to best practices in the face of a massive connection backlog.

Regards,
-- 
-Chuck