When I was experimenting with C# and WCF one of the things I kept reading about was how unscalable it is to have clients with a constant current connection to the server. And although WCF allows that it seems that the recommended best practise is to use ‘per call’ as opposed to ‘per session’ for instance management if you want to have any kind of decent scalablity. (Please correct me if Im wrong)
However from what I understand IRC uses constant client connections to the server and IRC servers (well networks of servers) are servicing hundreds of thousands of clients at any given time. So in that case is there nothing actually ‘bad’ about keeping constant client connections to the server?
As long as you don’t follow the one-thread-per-connection architecture, a server can support quite a large number of concurrent TCP connections.
IRC doesn’t require much per connection state, beyond the TCP send and receive windows.