How many threads to create and when?

Question

I have a networking Linux application which receives RTP streams from multiple destinations, does very simple packet modification and then forwards the streams to the final

Answer 1

I would look into a thread pool for this application.

http://threadpool.sourceforge.net/

Allow the thread pool to manage your threads and the queue.

You can tweak the maximum and minimum number of threads used based on performance profiling later.