We are running into an issue where running Sage 100c 2017 as a service on a Windows Server 2012 R2 instance seems to have a connection limit where after a certain number of windows/connections connect, it will start throwing up errors, particularly the "Connection failure to host:[tcp]{servername};{portnum};NODELAY;STREAM" and "Connection Timed Out waiting for your application to start ... The server side process failed to start or respond". It will start to happen once we get around 20 users logged in, with 3-5 windows/each. making me get a feeling that there's some sort of connection limit somewhere around 100 that seems to be happening. It also seems to happen to any connection over the threshold, including those initiated from the server it's running from (I've been told time and time again the NODELAY issue is related to networking, so was trying to eliminate any network interference.

I've checked, and double checked the network/firewall(to the point where it's completely disabled), and I can't find anything wrong. I've gone through the entire set of solutions the KB on that NODELAY issue, and none of the solutions except for running as an application seem to resolve the issue. Running as an application makes this connection limit disappear completely, which in my experience in networking tells me it is likely not a network/firewall issue, since it seems to be operating on the same ports/processes when running as a service or as an application. I've made sure the service user is setup, and have even tried running it under the same user that I'm running as an application to no avail.

I've been told that running as a service operates "differently" than as an application, with almost no explanation on what that means, or how differently it operates. From my perspective, it appears to communicate over similar TCP ports, and the same programs initiating those connections.

Has anyone else out there got the service to run without any connection limitations? Am I doomed to live with a user logging into the server to run the application. That seems to be a pretty big security risk to me, but maybe I'm just used to network applications running as services with limited accounts that usually can't even run an interactive login.