Do you mean that your experiments show that it's physically impossible (more or less) to get more than 10 connections per second, or that if you try to do more Bad Things™ happen?

The second one: if you try to do more Bad Things™ happen.

WS is a web service developed on top of a vendor product by the vendor itself. What happens is that if more than 10conn/sec come in, the first 10 are managed, and the exceeding are just accepted and then hung there until they timeout. Vendor says they can't change it, and by the way 10conn/sec are 600conn/min and that's a lot. I am SAYING not saying I agree or disagree here, just reporting it as they told me.

That's why the final solution was to cortocircuit-ate the developers of PE with those of WS and let them talk. Nevertheless, the problem was so interesting to me that I came out with this design. And having very little experience with threads I wanted to know if the design was ok. And I am also interested in different approaches, like yours for example.

By the way: thanks to all that answered. I am really curious on how this could be efficiently managed with POE (thanks emazep for talking about that).

Update: how could my keyboard give birth to the monster error up there????? I am pretty sure I wrote "not saying" from the beginning...