WinXP: What counts as a TCPIP connection?

I'm on SP2. I don't do P2P or serve any content, and rarely keep network locations open. I'm getting the following system event log:

EVENT ID 4226, TCP/IP has reached the security limit imposed on the number of concurrent TCP connect attempts

Googling reveals lots of background on why this is an issue with WinXP/SP2, and some "possible" fixes, none of which I'm ready to try at the moment.

My questions: aside from malware activity, what counts as a TCP connection? Specifically, if I have multiple Firefox sessions open, each with multiple tabs, does each URL count as a connection?

Can anybody recommend a "TCP connection monitor" application so I can see or log what's going on?

 

TCPView: http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/sysinternals/bb897437.aspx

Edit: CurrPorts is another. http://www.nirsoft.net/utils/cports.html

 

Innerpeace posted 2 nice ones. You could also use netstat -ano from command prompt.

As I have seen, when you run a browser, the program making tcp connections will be the browser. But that program can have many connections open. Usually, as you open a page, and then leave it open for some time, the tcp connection will eventually be closed. If you refresh the page or something, it will be opened again.

So too, could each component of a webpage create a connection. Depending. If you were to go to "bogus.com", perhaps there were many ads there, and each was fetched from a remote server. In effect then the browser would be, in displaying those ads, opening many different connections. However, most as I have seen, connections are used then closed in a timely manner. Most programs such as download managers and even browsers have settings which limit the number of open connections. There are many variables to look at. But still, tcpview should show you plenty.

Sul.

 

Thank you both for your replies. cport and TCPview are both great, they definitely give some useful info. I see a couple of things I can deep six, blankety-blank Java Quick Start for one.

It's interesting how many connections are listed for things like Outlook or even NOD's ekrn.exe.

I haven't yet read the help files enough to get the hang of exactly what constitutes "a connection" as far as contributing to the magic number "10" goes, but this will definitely help diagnose the TCP connections error.

 

Axial, you already got some good hints above, but another possibility for you, to mostly get rid of this error message, would be to add to your actual number of allowed connection. But you would preferably need to have a broadband internet line fast enough to support it smoothly, and there also _could_ be some negative side effects to this tweak, in some particular situations.

So better to read first about this matter (there are plenty of good doc online as you probably already know, here is one), but by using a safe program like SpeedGuide TCP Optimizer, among others, you could first test how it gives for you and always can revert this setting back at will.

As for me, I set it like in the fellowing screenshot with only benefit:



...but YMMV, as goes the saying!