I'm doing a project for a group that's using IRC as the guts of a chatroom, and I'm load-testing the irc daemon with a Perl script. It uses Net::IRC to make one connection to the server, then blathers endlessly, every $X seconds, on a channel until it's stopped. (All machines concerned here are running Linux 2.2.)

I need to run arbitrary huge numbers of connections (500+ per bot machine would be nice), so I can find out what the ircd can take. Problem is, I can only run about 100 bot processes before the bot machine starts flailing against the open-files limit of the OS. What can I do about this problem, short of recompiling the kernel?

Are there any general things I should be doing to increase the efficiency of the bot? I'm avoiding threads because I've heard they're unstable in Perl. Thoughts?

In reply to Net::IRC, load testing, and threads by srl

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