C10K problem

web devnetworking

The problem, named in 1999, of handling ten thousand simultaneous connections on one machine.

Not a hardware question but an architectural one: a server giving each connection its own process or thread runs out of memory and scheduler long before it runs out of CPU. The answer was the event loop, which is what NGINX and Apache's event module both use.

Also known as: c10k, ten thousand connections

← All glossary entries