[phillu]

Can someone point me to information on how to tune the linux kernel or OS to handle such large amounts of TCP connections?

I encountered problems with the default kernel configurations during the writing of my bachelor thesis and wasn't able to really read up on what could have been done to solve those problems. For example i observed high cpu usage only on the first core (similar to what the author describes in the article) due to a high amount of network interrupts. I tried to make those interrupts to be handled by all cores, which was neither recommended (as i remember) nor did it really help.

[kenOfYugen]

In previous work [1] we followed the Linux kernel documentation [2] and the guidelines published by IBM ITSO [3].

[1] http://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s00607-014-0394-9

[2] http://www.cyberciti.biz/files/linux-kernel/Documentation/ne...

[3] https://lenovopress.com/redp4285.pdf

[tostitos1979]

I suggest you look for slides from the Whatsapp folks on the kernel and Beam vm tuning they did to get similar numbers. Don't have the link handy but fairly easy to find.

What is more problematic IMHO is generating the load to saturate said server.

[davidw]

IIRC, the Whatsapp folks use FreeBSD.

[mickael]

We manage to load the server properly with Tsung (https://github.com/processone/tsung) but for a more heavy load we may need to add one more Tsung server.

[tim333]

Some info here http://stackoverflow.com/questions/22090229/how-did-whatsapp...