Can you elaborate / quantify the memory requirements a bit? I don't have much experience with MSQQL in this respect, so I'm curious how big the difference is.
Sure, SQL Server supports a maximum of 32767 connections each of which use around 128kB. Meaning that if you use the max connections you’ll need 4GB for the connection overhead.
We see no noticeable drop in performance with increased idle connection with our workload.