A detailed technical post outlines a modern approach to building high-performance network servers that can handle over 100,000 requests per second on contemporary hardware. The design moves beyond traditional event-driven patterns that have dominated for over two decades, leveraging epoll and kqueue system calls more effectively than typical wrapper libraries like libevent.

The recommended architecture uses one thread per CPU core, each pinned to a specific processor with its own epoll/kqueue file descriptor. Major state transitions like accepting connections and reading data are handled by separate threads, with file descriptors passed between them as clients move through different states. This eliminates decision points and creates simple blocking I/O calls that result in predictable performance.

Implementation details cover thread pool creation, processor affinity settings (including platform-specific code for Linux and macOS), socket configuration with deferred accepts and linger options, and the accept and request processing loops. The approach emphasizes proper resource limits, non-blocking sockets with timeouts, and careful consideration of how to distribute work across threads based on workload characteristics.