I think these can be and often are combined. You can definitely have an event driven main IO loop accepting connections and reading packets, that nevertheless d

I think these can be and often are combined. You can definitely have an event driven main IO loop accepting connections and reading packets, that nevertheless dispatches whole requests onto their own threads. I work with a lot of services written that way. The fact that you can reuse the frontend for several applications amortizes the cost of developing it as a high performance asynchronous thing. As for stack allocation I definitely see your point there. It is bizarre that Linux defaults to 2MB or whatever it is these days. I usually work with a 64KB thread stack.