Server - tasking and long lived connections

[Eric Merritt <cyberlync@yahoo.com>]

Hello All,

I am in the process of designing a server that will
need to accept long lived (up to several hours) client
connections. The processes themselves will be fairly
I/O bound (database accesses), and at most the number
of processors will be in the range of 2 - 4. The
obvious choice (in my mind) for this is to use a
single task per connection. In this senario, context
switching will not be a major issues due to the length
of the connections. There will be little or no
performance gains by using tasking, but it handles the
long connection times well. 

I do, however, have a few reservations about
scalablity due to OS limitations on the number of
threads per machine and the number of open file
descriptors. Although at first the number of
connections will not be high, it is possible that it
could rapidly need to scale up to a fairly high
number, several hundred or more. This may mean that I
will just have to distribute the app across several
boxs and do some type of mirroring on the databases,
but I want to put that off as long as possible. 

I have quit a bit of experience in code this type of
application but usually with short lived connections
or a low number of total connections. 

Anyway, I am just looking for some one to either point
me in a different direction or confirm my current
approach (one thread per connection).

Thank you for your input.


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