Usually you have a thread pool (threads have startup costs too), monitor the server socket and assign incoming connections to one of the worker threads. Nonbloc

Usually you have a thread pool (threads have startup costs too), monitor the server socket and assign incoming connections to one of the worker threads. Nonblocking architectures that do everything in a single thread also exist. It's very common even to do this: just use Apache `mod_proxy` (or something more specialised) to forward requests to a backend server such as Apache Tomcat.