ACE Programmer's Guide, The: Practical Design Patterns for Network and Systems Programming

Chapter 16. Thread Pools

Most network servers are designed to handle multiple client requests simultaneously. As we have seen, there are multiple ways to achieve this, including using reactive event handling, multiple processes, or multiple threads in our servers. When building a multithreaded server, many design options are available, including

• Spawning a new thread for each request

• Spawning a new thread for each connection/session

• Prespawning a managed pool of threads, or creating a thread pool

In this chapter, we explore thread pools in some detail. We start by defining what we mean by a thread pool and what advantages it provides over some of the other approaches to building multithreaded servers. We then go into some detail about ...