I've written a simple and small server application on Windows 2008 that just accepts connections and does nothing else. I am doing memory footprint assessment of socket calls, What I found that each connection (after accept()) consumes at least 2.5 KB of memory. Interestingly, the memory is not consumed by the process that has accept() call but it consumed by a OS process. I believe it might be because of data structures being created inside OS for each connection.

Now, I have two key questions:

Is it possible by any means to reduce this memory footprint (by changing any parameters, configuration etc) ? If yes how ? (Because 2K for each connection would be too much if we planning server to accept millions of connections)

If my server is intended to accept million connections, is it good idea to use Windows 2008 ? or shall I switch to some other OS?

Please advice me.