Network programming pr0n. How to scale a network server to 500,000+ connections on a single EC2 large instance using Java and NIO. Impressive stuff.

I was just reading their more recent slides for their OSCON 2012 talk “High performance network programming on the JVM” and they can now handle about 990,000 open connections with a single Java process (more on that here). :-O

Also, apparently EC2 limits the number of outbound connections to about 63k, meaning they needed about 16 extra large instances just to test that single Java server process. Crazy—but cool!