Personally, this has caused enough grief in the past (both ways, actually!) that I 'd say this is a major version change. I agree with John. Either value of conserve-sockets can crash or hang your system depending on your use case.
If this was just a matter of slowing down or speeding up performance, I think we could change it. But users that are impacted won't just see their system slow down. It will crash or hang. Potentially only with production sized workloads. With conserve-sockets=false every thread on the server creates its own sockets to other servers. With N servers that's N sockets per thread. With our default of a max of 800 threads for client connections and a 20 server cluster you are looking at a worst case of 800 * 20 = 16K sending sockets per server, with another 16K receiving sockets and 16K receiving threads. That's before considering function execution threads, WAN receivers, and various other executors we have on the server. Users with too many threads will hit their file descriptor or thread limits. Or they will run out of memory for thread stacks, socket buffers, etc. -Dan
