Slashdot Mirror
Should Servers be Mono-Process or Multithreaded?
An anonymous reader wonders: "How would you design the fastest possible Linux-based server application today? A few years ago, the thinking was that multi-threading was not the way to go — instead, high-performance servers used an event-driven, mono-process model (consider lighttpd and haproxy). However, things have changed. Today CPUs have dual cores, and over the next few years this is only likely to increase. Also, the 2.6 Linux kernel has made multi-threading much more efficient. So I'm wondering, does Slashdot think that modern high performance server software should be designed to be multi-threaded, or does it still make more sense to use an event driven, mono-process architecture, despite the advances in the Linux 2.6 threading and the arrival of multi-core CPUs?"
Drop the cash on an eight-core Sun T2000 server, get eight four-thread cores in one chip and go to town.
I've always considered multithreading the way to go - never ran a server that didn't have multiple processors or cores.
I may make you feel, but I can't make you think.
Check out the C10K page for a very detailed discussion about this.