60.5. The inetd (Internet Superserver) Daemon

If we look through the contents of /etc/services, we see literally hundreds of different services listed. This implies that a system could theoretically be running a large number of server processes. However, most of these servers would usually be doing nothing but waiting for infrequent connection requests or datagrams. All of these server processes would nevertheless occupy slots in the kernel process table, and consume some memory and swap space, thus placing a load on the system.

The inetd daemon is designed to eliminate the need to run large numbers of infrequently used servers. Using inetd provides two main benefits: