this link might also help you: http://www.kegel.com/c10k.html#limits.filehandles
Boris
Thank you Boris, I am not contesting that the per process file descriptor limit could be changed - you do need super-user access though to do so. I know that Postfix uses a child per connection model, and I would like to implement something similar. If I could pass, in a secure fashion, the listening socket into the child process (Postfix uses fork() and exec() with settings passed via environmental variables.). There is a process limit per user that is also 1024 on my system, so I should easily be able to handle 65536 connections if i am multi homed and bound to each interface address. As the limit is now 1024 file descriptors per process and a process limit of 1024 running processes. So I guess, my question is how do I span multiple sockets/file descriptors across multiple processes by using boost libraries. Etienne Pretorius.