Java thread per connection model vs NIO

Question

Is the non-blocking Java NIO still slower than your standard thread per connection asynchronous socket?

In addition, if you were to use threads per connection, would

Answer 1

If you willing to spend any amount of money on powerful enough hardware why limit yourself to one server. google don't use one server, they don't even use one datacenter of servers.

A common misconception is that NIO allows non-blocking IO therefor its the only model worth benchmarking. If you benchmark blocking NIO you can get it 30% faster than old IO. i.e. if you use the same threading model and compare just the IO models.

For a sophisticated game, you are far more likely to run out of CPU before you hit 10K connections. Again it is simpler to have a solution which scales horizontally. Then you don't need to worry about how many connections you can get.

How many users can reasonably interact? 24? in which case you have 1000 independent groups interacting. You won't have this many cores in one server.

How much money per users are you intending to spend on server(s)? You can buy an 12 core server with 64 GB of memory for less than £5000. If you place 2500 users on this server you have spent £2 per user.

EDIT: I have a reference http://vanillajava.blogspot.com/2010/07/java-nio-is-faster-than-java-io-for.html which is mine. ;) I had this reviewed by someone who is a GURU of Java Networking and it broadly agreed with what he had found.