I just tested a small application made using Tornado, and i'm far from the 10k simultanuous connections! To make the test, i've used Siege, under OpenSuse 12.2 64 bit, the machine is i7 with 8GB Here is the result:
siege -c 4000 localhost:8000
I got this error:
Transactions: 2164 hits
Availability: 39.90 %
Elapsed time: 6.85 secs
Data transferred: 2.52 MB
Response time: 1.04 secs
Transaction rate: 315.91 trans/sec
Throughput: 0.37 MB/sec
Concurrency: 329.74
Successful transactions: 2164
Failed transactions: 3260
Longest transaction: 5.94
Shortest transaction: 0.00
And if i use 10k connection:
siege -c 10000 localhost:8000
I get an error:
[error] descriptor table full sock.c:109: Too many open files