Technical Linux questions

[jdarnold at buddydog.org (Jonathan Arnold)]

A couple technical questions regarding Linux have come up on
a project I'm working on (using RedHat 7.1) and I was wondering
if anyone here either had the answers or could point me to a
resource to find them.

1] What is the default and theoretical maximum number of processes
that you can run at once?

2] What is the theoretical maximum number of sockets that a single
process can listen and respond on?

The two, as you might imagine, are connected. I need to respond to
possible input from up to a thousand different ports, and spawning
a process to listen on each isn't working - probably too
many processes. But if I have a program listen on 10 sockets, can I
respond fast enough? How about 100? All the sockets won't be in use
at the same time, but I never know which ones exactly are needed.
Perhaps I need to do something like inetd, and just listen on a
bunch of sockets and spawn off the process to handle the input
when needed?

Thanks for any advice and/or web resources you can point me to.

-- 
Jonathan Arnold     (mailto:jdarnold at buddydog.org)
Amazing Developments       http://www.buddydog.org

It ain't what you don't know that gets you into trouble.
It's what you know for sure that just ain't so.  Mark Twain