April 1, 2008
10:05 a.m.
Just guessing it's the parameter that gets passed to the listen system call. And that again tells the kernel how many connections to allow to backlog. Citing the listen manpage on Linux: The backlog argument defines the maximum length to which the queue of pending connections for sockd may grow. If a connection request arrives when the queue is full, the client may receive an error with an indication of ECONNREFUSED or, if the underlying protocol supports retransmission, the request may be ignored so that a later reattempt at connection succeeds. Andreas