I work for an application-service provider.. sort of... anyway. One
of our many applications is actually a TN3270/telnet application which
has hooks into a microsoft IE DLL to tunnel/encrypt the user traffic
over SSL. So on the network, we see encrypted packets destined to/
from port 443.

This traffic hits a load-balancer that offloads the SSL encrypt/
decrypt process.

We are having an issue where, it seems, everything a single user does
(like just login, or pull up a VT100 screen) ends up launching 8-12
TCP connections. Over the course of a day 160 users launched upwards
of 90000 tcp sessions.

We have many thousands of users (well in excess of 20000 users) that
use this application. Needless to say, this is starting to cripple
our load balancers.

Its my belief.. as an ex-programmer from a decade+ ago, that for the
duration a user is logged into this app there should be a single TCP
session. Maybe things are different now.