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Asked: 2026-05-14T02:34:41+00:00

I am writing a simple multithreaded socketserver and I am wondering how best to

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I am writing a simple multithreaded socketserver and I am wondering how best to handle incoming connections:

  1. create a new thread for each new connection. The number of concurrent threads would be limited and waiting connections limited by specifying a backlog

  2. add all incoming connections into a queue and have a pool of worker threads that process the queue

I am inclined to go for option 2 because I really don’t want to refuse any connections, even under high loads, but I am wondering if there are any considerations I should be aware of with accepting effectively unlimited connections?

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  1. Editorial Team

    With unlimited connections you potentially can create a huge number of threads. That means a lot of processing is required, plus each thread will consume a fixed amount of memory by default merely for the heap (I think the figure is 512kB per thread, but that may be platform dependent).

    By pooling a fixed number of threads and accepting a limited number of clients you will ensure that some of your clients will be serviced in a reasonable time period, and your server won’t collapse from overloading.

    You may want to check out this article on building servers using NIO or perhaps check out frameworks such as Apache Mina.

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