Concurrent connection and performance?

I have a Comet application that may have many instances open at开发者_运维技巧 once. This means many concurrent connections. It shouldn't be too hard to vary the connection hostname in order to overcome browser concurrent connection limit. My question is: How would this fair on an average internet connection? Will I run into performance issues?

Normally comet applications don't pass a lot of data, but do hold connections open a long time, so it should be ok on the client side. On the server side, you may have issues if you exceed the number of available TCP ports, but "holding a connection open" is more accounting than transfer. The short answer would be: "depends on how much data you want to push about". Watch out for session limits of hardware firewalls, etc., though. Some good hints here: http://www.metabrew.com/article/a-million-user-comet-application-with-mochiweb-part-1

Just in case answer: If you're hosting this from a home system, look forward to trouble, because home routers usually have issues with high numbers of open sessions overflowing their firewall/anti-ddos/whatever pools.