possible to use more then 65535 ports for Xmpp PubSub or Comet implementation?

Question

In Comet/Reverse Ajax/PubSub underlying technology/fundamental is Long polling. So connection is kept open for a minute or so..
And as per my little knowledge about networking and OS, TCP/IP supports only 65535 ports, so my question is how any server can support more then 65535 connections concurrently?

In application I am building, All users are going to connect at same time, and wants live updates from server.. like stock treading realtime updates..

Cheers,

Answer 1

You are correct in that there are 65535 unique port numbers, but a TCP server application allows many clients to connect to the same port on a server. For example, in a web server all clients connect to port 80. Connections are uniquely identified by the 4-tuple (src-address, src-port, dest-address, dest-port).

You will definitely want to read about the so-called C10K problem when designing your implementation.