> Again, why? My understanding is that this controls the range of ports that the kernel selects from for new sockets; e.g., if you make a TCP connection to google.com on port 443, on _your side_ the connection is <your ip> : <a port from that range>; the default range is [32768, 61000], and this is per destination IP. (You can have two connections to two separate IPs with the same local port.) The default range is nearly 30k ports wide. Are you opening >30k connections to a single host?

This port range is sometimes known as the "ephemeral port range" and works as you described. How can you have 32 tabs open to news.ycombinator.com port 80? The source port on your machine are all different ports and from that range.

The 30K range is not to a single host, it's just all open connections waiting for data to return. That is to say, the connections are established, being established, or being torn down. If the connection was completely torn down you'd be able to reuse the port and there would be no issue.

So if your network working set is >28K ports, you may need to change this setting. Most people probably don't need to change this. If you do need to change this because you find your application is throwing errors about binding to ports in use, the above suggestion is fairly decent for setting and forgetting.

The one problem with the above suggestion is if you have an application binding to a port somewhere in the range of 10240-32768 or 61001-65535 (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_TCP_and_UDP_port_number... for examples, it's obviously not complete). You can't just say that 10240-65535 is fair game for ephemeral connections, because inevitably an ephemeral connection will block a known port bind attempt, and your service will fail to run.