Limits of Windows

From Mark Russinovich's blog:

1. Pushing the Limits of Windows: Physical Memory

2. Pushing the Limits of Windows: Virtual Memory

3. Pushing the Limits of Windows: Paged and Nonpaged Pool

4. Pushing the Limits of Windows: Processes and Threads

5. Pushing the Limits of Windows: Handles

6. Pushing the Limits of Windows: USER and GDI Objects – Part 1

7. Pushing the Limits of Windows: USER and GDI Objects – Part 2


BTW, from MSDN:

C run-time I/O now supports many more open files on Win32 platforms than in previous versions. Up to 2,048 files can be open simultaneously at the lowio level (that is, opened and accessed by means of the _open, _read, _write, and so forth family of I/O functions). Up to 512 files can be open simultaneously at the stdio level (that is, opened and accessed by means of the fopen, fgetc, fputc, and so forth family of functions). The limit of 512 open files at the stdio level can be increased to a maximum of 2,048 by means of the _setmaxstdio function.

Because stdio-level functions, such as fopen, are built on top of the lowio functions, the maximum of 2,048 is a hard upper limit for the number of simultaneously open files accessed through the C run-time library.