Q. How many concurrent NAT sessions are supported in Cisco IOS NAT?
A. The NAT session limit is bounded by the amount of available DRAM in the router. Each NAT translation consumes about 312 bytes in DRAM. As a result, 10,000 translations (more than would generally be handled on a single router) consume about 3 MB. Therefore, typical routing hardware has more than enough memory to support thousands of NAT translations.
Q. When configuring for PAT (overloading), what is the maximum number of translations that can be created per inside global IP address?
A. PAT (overloading) divides the available ports per global IP address into three ranges: 0-511, 512-1023, and 1024-65535. PAT assigns a unique source port for each UDP or TCP session. It attempts to assign the same port value of the original request, but if the original source port has already been used, it starts scanning from the beginning of the particular port range to find the first available port and assigns it to the conversation. There is an exception for 12.2S code base. 12.2S code base uses different port logic, and there is no port reservation.
http://www.cisco.com/c/en/us/support/docs/ip/network-address-translation-nat/26704-nat-faq-00.html
