Why can't you expand the number of network ports?

Question

Computer networks

Highly loaded systems run into a limit on the number of ports. They use balancers, split services across multiple servers/addresses. IPv6 is intended to solve this problem by supporting the assignment of multiple IP addresses to a server.
Why not just expand the 16-bit field in the IP header to 32 bits (or more).
Large companies wouldn't have to own a bunch of IPs to ensure availability. 4294967296 - ports would be enough for the eyes. This is definitely better than 10-20-30 addresses with 65535 ports.
Yes, and IPv6 was also limited to 16 bits for the port number.
Does it have any serious prerequisites?

Answer 1

You don't represent legacy scale...

Answer 2

So on the service, there is only one port for connecting - for example, the 80th, but to the client it’s just dynamic ... And load balancing so that the hardware can cope, and the fault tolerance is ...

Answer 3

Highly loaded systems run into a limit on the number of ports.

Are you talking about TCP ports? Could you elaborate on this idea? I don't quite understand you.

IPv6 is intended to solve this problem by supporting the assignment of multiple IP addresses to a server.

And in the case of IPv4, in your opinion, it is impossible to do this, that is, assign a lot of addresses to the server?
In my opinion, the main problem in the TCP / IP stack is the lack of a coherent session layer (session layer in terms of ISO OSI). Therefore, each service/layer categorizes traffic by session in its own way, for example, TCP by a tuple of source and destination addresses and ports, HTTP by cookie, and so on. In IPv6, there is indeed an innovation relevant to this problem in the form of a flow label field, it is interesting what options for its practical application will appear.
Well, we must not forget that the network is infrastructure, and changing infrastructure, especially developed infrastructure, is long and difficult.

Answer 4

The number of ports - this limitation pops up exactly in one place - on the nata. The www server needs two ports - 80 and 443. The same for other services.
But the problem that it is impossible to assign an address to the connection to the client is a reality. We have to take clients to nat;) And develop IPv6

Answer 5

Good hypothesis, but no. We have enough ports, it is difficult for us to process the number of connections on one processor, say more than 10k connections, because we start to run into the OS scheduler, which simply cannot cope with such a number of threads.

Answer 6

The previous speakers seem to have misunderstood the point. Yes, there is only one external receiving port, but on loaded systems, there are usually a whole bunch of servers and services behind this port, and so for them 65535 is often not enough. There is only one solution - horizontal scaling of external ports (servers)