Actually, everything was pretty simple: Use libev since it's faster than libevent, use Node's http parser because it's fast. Then allow each thread in the pool to run its own event loop. This pretty much sums up my university's Internet Programming course. There were few hairy bits about tcmalloc, but they did a great job about explaining how they took advantage of object pooling and region-based memory management. Great post guys, I can't wait to give your source a read :)