How many clients can be served by the server at the same time?
But a server can (theoretically) serve 65535 simultaneous connections per client. So in practice the server is only limited by how much CPU power, memory etc. it has to serve requests, not by the number of TCP connections to the server.
How can a Web server handle multiple user’s incoming requests at a time on a single port 80 )?
The server opens a socket that ‘listens’ at port 80 and ‘accepts’ new connections from that socket. Each new connection is represented by a new socket whose local port is also port 80, but whose remote IP:port is as per the client who connected. So they don’t get mixed up.
How does a server differentiate between two connections?
TCP Listener ports differentiate connections based on a socket, which is a combination of IP:port . For a client to connect multiple times to the same server, from the same machine, it uses multiple ports (usually ephemeral) to the same known (listener) port.
Can a server have multiple sockets?
So as long as the IP/Port number is unique, you can have as many sockets listening on the same port number as you like.
How multiple clients can connect to the same port on server?
Multiple clients can connect to the same port (say 80) on the server because on the server side, after creating a socket and binding (setting local IP and port) listen is called on the socket which tells the OS to accept incoming connections.
What happens if I connect to the same web server twice?
Simply, if I connect to the same web server twice from my client, the two connections will have different source ports from my perspective and destination ports from the web server’s. So there is no ambiguity, even though both connections have the same source and destination IP addresses.
Can a server respond to multiple sockets at the same time?
First understand that for a single server process that is listening to same port, there could be more than one sockets (may be from same client or from different clients). Now as long as a server knows which request is associated with which socket, it can always respond to appropriate client using the same socket.
What happens when a client connects to a server?
When a client connects to a server, it picks a random, unused high-order source port. This way, a single client can have up to ~64k connections to the server for the same destination port. So, this is really what gets created when a client connects to a server: