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Comment by throwaway20371 | Hacker News Reader

throwaway20371·

I'm pretty sure even back then you could edit the hard-coded limit in the source code and recompile. I remember us doing something like this as it was too expensive to just keep buying servers and our apps were connection-happy.

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I recall going down this rabbit hole about fifteen years ago. It is, in principle, possible but you're going to be recompiling everything that could conceivably use an fd_set (so probably every single piece of code that links libc...) because it's a fixed size buffer that scales with FD_SETSIZE.

This was actually less of a problem than it seems in hindsight — back at that time, package managers were relatively new and not often used as were dynamic libraries, so most things were just static binaries compiled from tarballs.

I know 15 years ago feels like it ought to be back in the dimly-veiled prehistory of Linux but actually we were on RHEL4, which was released in 2005.

Really? Thought they bumped it in the late 90s. I was running IRC servers mostly in the 1995-2000 timeframe and I remember the connection limit going away at one point? It’s been ages, but I largely quit using IRC once I went to college so it had to be sometime around the late 90s :)

Every network also seemed to have its own fork of ircd (and at least one rewrote it from scratch), so could have just been that the ones I used patched it in and others didn’t.

1024 was the max you could boost it to; 256 was the default as I recall. Linux 1.x was pretty bootstrappy.

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