Question: How many Virtual Serial Ports (VSPs) can be created on one PC?
Answer: This depends on the Windows flavor you are using. Earlier Windows versions – 98 and ME – only allowed you to have up to 16 serial ports. VSPs are registered on your Windows system as serial ports, so the above limitation also applies: total combined number of serial ports including “regular” ports and VSPs cannot exceed 16.
Under Windows NT, 2000 and XP there are no limitations imposed by the operating system itself. This means that theoretically you can have as many ports as you want. Our current Tibbo Device Server Toolkit software set a (rather artificial) limit at 255 ports which seems to be more than adequate for all conceivable applications.
Note, however, that every VSP consumes some resources – thus, often it is not practical to create more than 30 VSPs or so (you will get a performance hit). But this is a factor determined by hardware – a powerful computer could create more VSPs.
In general, using many VSPs is not considered good practice. For such systems, try to use direct IP communications – these scale much better.
