Patent ID: 8341727

Claim:
A server computer comprising: a communications receiver that receives communications packets through a communications medium from remote computers; a communications transmitter that transmits communications packets to the remote computers through the communications medium; an input memory buffer into which communications packets received by the communications receiver are queued by the communications receiver; an output memory buffer into which communications packets are queued by a processor for transmission to the communications medium by the communications transmitter; and electronic data-storage resources into which a processor stores information related to a state for each communications connections between the server computer and remote computers, including a first table that stores, in each entry, a first portion of the state information for a communications connection as well as a reference to an entry in a second table that stores a second portion of the state information for the communications connection, the number of bits used to encode the first portion of the state information less than 25% of the number of bits used to encode the second portion of the state information; wherein the processor stores sufficient state information into an entry of the first table to initiate establishment of a communications connection upon receiving an initial connection-request packet from a remote computer while deferring storing complete state information for the communications connection until completion of a multi-packet exchange, according to a multi-phase connection protocol, so that electronic data-storage resources are less likely to be exhausted by storing complete state information for initiated communications connections prior to completion of the multi-packet exchange for the initiated communications connections.