Admittedly this is a simple question but 20 minutes of googling and I just can't find an answer… I will frame my question with an example.
say I own www.reallypopular.com and my website sees 100 GET requests per second. Also let's say the average time for my server to respond to that GET request is 1 second (for the sake of the example just assume some server side processing.) My understanding of ports would say that the first client to contact my server would then block anyone else from connection to port 80 for 1 second. Following this logic, effectively only 1% of all users would actually be responded to and the rest would get "Port busy" or "not responding" or some such error.
Obviously I am missing something because this is clearly not what is happening so instead of proposing my theories as to why I'd love it if someone could set me straight here or point me to something I could read to clear this up. Thanks much.
Best Answer
The answer can be found in this wikipedia article:
Also, from this article on Berkeley sockets on wikipedia.