I think that's actually my whole point here. If I'm running a system on anywhere near the scale I'm used to operating, you damn well better believe that I'm goi

I think that's actually my whole point here. If I'm running a system on anywhere near the scale I'm used to operating, you damn well better believe that I'm going to worry about "20 billion connections." The concrete reason, which I can give a priori without even waiting for it to happen first, is that the best case scenario for what's going on is probably that the servers are being hugged to death. That and we've violated the laws of physics. Because even by the numbers that you agreed are grossly optimistic (which was deliberate), we're looking at that consuming an order of magnitude or two more RAM than we have across all our servers. So that would admittedly be cool. But still.