I have a self-hosted WebAPI which uses SignalR. The process is running on a client OS (Windows 7). Let's assume most clients fall back to long-polling. How many clients can I roughly have? I'm asking because I read Microsoft keeps concurrent connections artificially low on client OS (the article is about IIS though)...
In this regard does it matter whether or not clients are using long-polling or WebSockets?
I don't have a definitive answer regarding request limits for self-hosting on Win 7, but I can say that there can be a difference between long-polling and WebSockets since with long-polling, you can use up several requests at a time, while the WebSockets connection always uses one.
I suspect that the IIS connection limits are not enforced when self-hosting with OWIN, so you'd deal with the ASP.NET limits (defaulting at 5000 concurrent requests per CPU) which you can read about here and here.
Since long-polling can use a variable number of concurrent requests, it's not possible to say how many clients you can have exactly; it depends on what the clients do. So you'll have to estimate or measure based on typical usage scenarios.
