It seems that every modern program have a desire to keep as many connections open at the same time as possible, and most of the time for no reason. Needless to say I don’t like that. Sockets are a resource like memory and cpu.
If you want to check the number of open connections and which program that opened them, use the following command prompt command:
netstat -o
the -o parameter give you the process Id of the owning process.
To my surprise I found two socket hungry applications on my system that I didn’t even know I had running or installed:
Both are some torrent like programs that are used by various quite legit organizations to distribute software or multimedia content. That would actually be okay, if you agreed to install the programs, but they always come bundled and hidden in some other software. I got the Akamai stuff from Lego Universe and Pando from Allods Online.
But both have been uninstalled now.
The akamai net session interface is quite crappy and not uninstalled properly with its host application thus I had to follow this guide. Pando Media Booster can be installed from add/remove programs, luckily.