Data streaming - Connection Limit

Question

I am trying to run ActionController::LIVE, but I don't quite understand the connection handling of the server yet.

Let's say I have 2 processes running on 16 threads each and something like a Chat application which is storing the messages in a database and streaming its data to the participants, does it mean I can only have 32 Chat Participants in total since the single connections are active all the time? - Else how are those connections distributed? Do they require a Sql connection each?

Answer 1

Yes.

This is the major drawback of this architecture.

This is where event oriented architectures are useful, with each process running a constant event loop and maintaining a vast number of connections and responding to events.