Ok, now the picture is clearer. I have however no idea what the real problem is. The number of concurrent programs in midas is 64 as defined in midas.h (MAX_CLIENTS) so that should not be the problem. In our experiment we run 10 front-ends (but 
on 10 different machines) without problems. Other experiments used 27 front-ends.

The TCP error you see comes probably from the fact that the mserver side crashes or quits, then the socket gets broken. What you can try to debug this is to run mserver manually. Just remove mserver from inetd, and start it with "mserver -d" and 
watch what happens. Do you see any additional error messages. If the mserver segfaults, you should turn on core dumps and have a look there. Note that the mserver starts a child process on each incoming connection, so running mserver in gdb 
does not really help, since the child processes (which connect back to the front-ends) are not seen by gdb.

Have you tried to run the 9 front-ends on maybe two different PCs (5 and 4) to see if the problem is on the client side?


Best regards,
Stefan