I don't know the scale of "many" here, but in the thousands, I think Paul's presentation makes the case for threads given the near free cost of having idle thre

I don't know the scale of "many" here, but in the thousands, I think Paul's presentation makes the case for threads given the near free cost of having idle threads sitting around and activating/deactivating them as long as they aren't contending for something. A few folks have mentioned that the cost of context switching and state-restore using NIO is more expensive than this especially on a multi-cored machine which I thought was interesting. Again, I don't know how helpful that is to you, because your "many" could have meant 10s of thousands of connections, in which case threads wouldn't be the answer. Unless you wanted to get fancy with a hybrid approach ;)