# What happens to servers reaching full capacity?

**URL:** <https://community.wowza.com/t/what-happens-to-servers-reaching-full-capacity/220>\
**Category:** Wowza Streaming Engine\
**Created:** [April 29, 2008, 6:04pm UTC](https://community.wowza.com/t/what-happens-to-servers-reaching-full-capacity/220 "2008-04-29T18:04:41Z")\
**Posts on this page:** 5\
**Page:** 1

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**Author:** ![system](https://sea2.discourse-cdn.com/flex002/user_avatar/community.wowza.com/system/32/447_2.png) [@system](https://community.wowza.com/u/system)\
**Post date:** [April 29, 2008, 6:04pm UTC](https://community.wowza.com/t/what-happens-to-servers-reaching-full-capacity/220/1 "2008-04-29T18:04:41Z")

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Hi, can you tell me what happens when live servers reach or get close to their full capacity… are they likely to fail or do they just start refusing new connections?

In either case is there a way to detect they are reaching capacity before it happens, or should we just limit the connections?

Anthony

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**Author:** ![Charlie\_Good](https://sea2.discourse-cdn.com/flex002/user_avatar/community.wowza.com/charlie_good/32/383_2.png) [@Charlie\_Good](https://community.wowza.com/u/Charlie_Good)\
**Post date:** [April 29, 2008, 10:59am UTC](https://community.wowza.com/t/what-happens-to-servers-reaching-full-capacity/220/2 "2008-04-29T10:59:38Z")

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Your best bet is to limit the number of connections to the server. You can do this in **conf/VHosts.xml** using the **ConnectionLimit** setting. Zero means unlimited.

Charlie

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**Author:** ![Charlie\_Good](https://sea2.discourse-cdn.com/flex002/user_avatar/community.wowza.com/charlie_good/32/383_2.png) [@Charlie\_Good](https://community.wowza.com/u/Charlie_Good)\
**Post date:** [April 29, 2008, 12:20pm UTC](https://community.wowza.com/t/what-happens-to-servers-reaching-full-capacity/220/3 "2008-04-29T12:20:29Z")

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No, the server will not stop accepting connections. There are just too many factors to monitor to determine when to stop. You can certainly build something that fits your application and heuristics outside of Wowza Pro to determine when to startup another instance. But this is not functionality that we supply as part of our server.

Charlie

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**Author:** ![Anthony\_Corcutt](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/a/f4b2a3/32.png) [@Anthony\_Corcutt](https://community.wowza.com/u/Anthony_Corcutt)\
**Post date:** [April 29, 2008, 8:12pm UTC](https://community.wowza.com/t/what-happens-to-servers-reaching-full-capacity/220/4 "2008-04-29T20:12:39Z")

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Ok, the only problem with that is we don’t always know what bitrate customers will publish at so the limit can vary. I was hoping we could use that as our last option.

Will the server stop accepting connections automatically if it cant handle them?

If so we can easily count the number of clients trying to connect and compare with those connected and start up additional servers as needed.

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**Author:** ![Anthony\_Corcutt](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/a/f4b2a3/32.png) [@Anthony\_Corcutt](https://community.wowza.com/u/Anthony_Corcutt)\
**Post date:** [April 29, 2008, 8:19pm UTC](https://community.wowza.com/t/what-happens-to-servers-reaching-full-capacity/220/5 "2008-04-29T20:19:38Z")

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Actually… looking at your performance stats it looks like were going to run out of network bandwidth before we get close to server capacity, Im guessing we can just rely on the client connection timing out.