title: How many Windows handles in use is "too many"?
body: <p>I understand that the answer to this question may depend on registry settings and on the version of Windows, and perhaps on the amount of RAM if there is not enough memory.  For the sake of this question, assume that the server has plenty of RAM (3+ GiB).</p>
  
  <p>If an application (3rd party application in this case) leaks handles at a few hundred an hour, how many total handles can that application leak before other applications will run into troubles?  By "troubles" I mean, for example, fail to start a thread, fail to open a file, and so on.</p>
  
  <p>I've seen some servers (lightly loaded) run just fine with a process (usually a database process) using a few tens of thousands of handles, so the old 10000 handle limit is clearly not the issue here.  (And that was a per-process limit anyway, so wouldn't affect my application which is well under that point.)</p>
  
  <p>Can someone either answer the question or point me at some resources that explain about how many total handles a Windows server will allow before you effectively run out (of handles or other system resources)?</p>