The situation for WordPress 5.1:
- After publishing a post,
wp-includes/post.php
‘s_publish_post_hook()
schedules thedo_pings
action for immediate execution. This is put into the “cron” option in database. - Whenever the cron job runs,
do_all_pings()
is executed, which sends pingbacks for all outstanding posts. pingback()
extracts all links from the post text and sends a pingback to each of them.
There is no limitation to 2 links anywhere.