> So even if you have a massive amount of cores in that machine, you still don't really have much time to spend on a single request and a single mutex operation will exceed your budget.

fortunately it's no longer 2000 and I have more than one core, and my NIC has more than one queue

generating requests is a lot less CPU intensive than parsing requests

how much CPU do I have to spend to get a pre-formed 100 byte request into the NICs queue? not much at all

(the TCP negotiation will likely be the bottleneck)