Unreal IRCD Windows Raise Connection Limit?

[h4tr3d]

Hello, I'm currently running windows unrealircd which allows 4088 connections... I Was wondering on how to raise the limit?... i know you need to compile it... but could somone walk me through on doing this? ...

[Stealth]

Unreal on Windows is compiled to hold 4096 connections. If you have tested it and only gotten 4088 connections, then that's all your OS allows.

The following is also VERY unlikely:

• You will have more than 4096 legitimate users. There are only a handful of UnrealIRCD networks with more than 4100 users. So you're either on crack, running a botnet, or just wanting to be greedy.
• You have more than 4100 users and lack the funding to get real IRCd hosting to have more than 1 server.
• People will actually like your administration practices. Judging by your other topics and posts, it looks like your intentions will not be of those users desire.
• Your connection is able to support that many users. You need to remember that IRC with that many users takes up a lot of bandwidth (unless you're running a botnet). Also, don't come back and say you have 100 or 1000 mbps, that's your LAN connection, not your ISP's throughput.
• Windows will have the processing power and memory to handle that many users. MANY Windows applications are very greedy when it comes to CPU time and memory. In order to run an IRCd with that many users on Windows you'll need to have a dedicated computer for just IRC with a decent processor and plenty of memory (hint: if there's a paging file and the system is using it, Windows will unlikely be able to handle 4100 users efficiently which means lag). If you have the money for a dedicated Windows system for IRC, you have the money to get a shell.

Compiling Unreal to hold more than 4096 users successfully on Windows requires not only modification of Unreal, but modification of Windows network settings. This needs to be done VERY carefully, because if you try to allow more connections than Windows can handle, Windows will close ALL IRC connections when the limit is reached. I'm sure you won't really want that either.

In short, get hosting. If you can't afford it, ask some of your 4100 users for donations. The only way asking for donations won't work is if you're running a botnet, and we won't help you do that.

[katsklaw]

I'd like to augment this topic by stating that even EFnet doesn't hold 4k users per server, at the time of this writing they have 1 at 4400, the rest are anywhere between 100 and 2500 each. The largest net that actively allows Windows based daemons is webchat which appears to have roughly 1500 users per server based on what info I can gather at a quick glance. Your network would have to be huge to demand 4k per server.

However, if you are serious about demanding high user count abilities, you'll nee *nix. I personally find freebsd the easiest since max file descriptors is a dynamic number based on specs, namely RAM and not hard coded in the kernel. Example, freebsd out of the box on a system with 1gb ram can easily have 11k file descriptors.

[Stealth]

The largest net that actively allows Windows based daemons is webchat

Actually Webchat canned their Windows servers back in 2006, maybe even a little earlier. The ConferenceRoom software still has a Windows release, but I understand it is just a GUI frontend like most windows-ported daemons.

[katsklaw]

ahh, I didn't know that. Personally I've always believed daemons shouldn't be on windows. Anyway, Thanks for the info.

[h4tr3d]

Weird thing enough, on one of my windows servers... i can have 4088 connections... and on another windows server.... (same OS, same RAM.. Same everything) i can only have 2088.... I Wonder why... ... I've checked my connection limit in the config and i put 999999999 ... anyone have any ideas?

[Stealth]

Different Windows installations will hold different amounts of connections. The limit is set internally by Windows based on such things as: processes running, hard drive space, RAM, CPU speed, background services, etc. The connection limit in the configuration has nothing to do with what your operating system says it can handle, it is there for an added control (for example if you had 4000 available connections, and had multiple servers running on the same system you might limit Unreal to 2000 connections so the other services don't get blocked unintentionally).