Thoughts on scalability
Here is an interesting contribution on the topic from Preston Elder I've worked in multiple extremely super-scaled applications (including ones sustaining 70,000 connections at any one time, 10,000 new connections each minute, and 15,000 concurrent throttled file transfers at any one time - all in one application instance on one machine). The biggest problem I have seen is people don't know how to properly define their thread's purpose and requirements, and don't know how to decouple tasks that have in-built latency or avoid thread blocking (and locking). For example, often in a high-performance network app, you will have some kind of multiplexor (or more than one) for your connections, so you don't have a thread per connection. But people often make the mistake of doing too much in the multiplexor's thread. The multiplexor should ideally only exist to be able to pull data off the socket, chop it up into packets that make sense, and hand it off to some kind of