A standard Nginx server on a modern 8-core machine can handle roughly how many concurrent idle connections (C10k problem)?

Historically, the 'C10k' problem referred to the difficulty of handling 10,000 simultaneous connections on a single server. Modern load balancers like Nginx solved this by using an 'event-driven' architecture (using system calls like `epoll` or `kqueue`). Because these idle connections don't require their own dedicated CPU thread—only a few kilobytes of RAM to maintain the socket state—a single 8-core server can easily manage hundreds of thousands of concurrent open connections (like WebSockets or Keep-Alive HTTP). The actual limit is usually determined by how much RAM is available to track the socket buffers, rather than CPU processing power.