While trying to diagnose a network/application issues with my companies application and the client’s network we got on the topic of possible running out of out TCP sockets on either the client workstation or the server. While I didnt have any concrete facts as to whether this was a possible issue I turned to my trusty friend, google.com. Very quickly I can across an article the goes into great detail about this exact topic and I felt that it was to good to not let everyone else know about it also.
To keep the TCP/IP stack from taking all resources on the computer, there are different parameters that control how many connections it can handle. If running applications that are constantly opening and closing connections (P2P), or are providing a service which many tries to connect to at the same time (Web-server like IIS), then one can improve the performance of these applications by changing the restriction limits.
The author also goes in to great detail about how to configure Windows networking for maximum performance.