title: How many child processes can a node.js cluster spawn on a 64bit Wintel PC?
body: <p>I was running a concurrency test, and for brevity's sake, defined a process for each spoofed http request. It worked fine for up to 64 requests/processes, but folded on 65. I'm running Window 7 (64bit) on an I5 laptop, with 4GB of Ram. </p>
  
  <p>Whilst running the test I had a Chrome open (with a handful of tabs), and I expect that the OS' common system processes would also have some effect, but I know too little about node.js at the lowest level to understand where the problem lies.</p>
  
  <p>For example, one article suggest it's possible to run well over 8000 processes on a 2GB 64-bit Windows XP system:</p>
  
  <p><a href="http://blogs.technet.com/b/markrussinovich/archive/2009/07/08/3261309.aspx" rel="nofollow">http://blogs.technet.com/b/markrussinovich/archive/2009/07/08/3261309.aspx</a></p>
  
  <p>But the 64 child process figure that I ran into was rather conspicuous.</p>
  
  <p>Any ideas?</p>