Hi,
A tricky question for sure as this depends on the following:
- The specifications of your computer (modern computers can have thousands of handles/instances open easily)
- The specifications of your NIC (bandwidth)
- The specifications of your network (bandwidth again)
- The amount of data you are sending through each port (ultimately you are limited by the bandwidth of the NIC)
I would say there is a design issue if you are considering more than a few hundred ports. For example if you were to implement some kind of variable sharing mechanism over UDP and you were going to use a port per variable then thats fine upto some limit (I've said a few hundred as this is an intuitively good number), after which you should consider implementing it differently (wrapping your variables in a packet and sending it through 1 port, and unwrapping at the other end).
Hope this helps,
