Comment 21 for bug 260138

(In reply to comment #3)
> Note that raising MAXCLIENTS lowers the number of resources each client
> can have since the resource namespace is fixed across all clients in the
> X11 protocol, and evenly divided among them.
>
> Years ago we fixed this in Xsun in Solaris by offering an option to set
> maxclients at runtime to either 128 or 1024, allowing sites the option
> to set this themselves, but it did incur a small performance cost across
> the X server everytime that flag was checked. If someone wanted to
> investigate a similar option in Xorg, I could release that code.

It is clear that the tradeoff that was made to only allow 256 connections is heavily lopsided towards allowing those clients to open far more resources than any actually use in practice.

https://bugs.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+source/xorg-server/+bug/260138

Large clients have been shown to use 3500 resources each, but we allow them to use 2^29/256, or 2 million. Can't we steal quite a few more bits for increasing the number of X clients? I don't just want a doubling - I never come close to the resources-per-client limit, but I am always running into the number-of-clients limit.

If it's a bit too much work to add a configuration or cmdline option (your patch would definitely be worthwhile though), can't we change the default (such as in http://readlist.com/lists/lists.freedesktop.org/xorg/3/17055.html ) anyway, since it's currently so heavily lopsided?