In order to develop a highly network intensive server application on linux, what sort of architecture is preferred? The idea is that this app would typically run on machines with multiple cores (either virtual or physical). Considering that performance is the key criteria, is it better to go for a multi-threaded application or the one with multi-process design? I do know that sharing of resources and synchronization to access of such resources from multiple processes is a lot of programming overhead, but as mentioned earlier overall performance is the key requirement and so we can ignore those things. And the programming language would be C/C++.

I have heard that even the multi-threaded applications (single process) can take advantage of multiple cores and run each thread on a different core independently (as long as there is no sync issues). And this scheduling is done by the kernel. If so, is there not much difference in performance between multi-threaded applications and multi-process applications? Nginx uses a multi-process architecture and is really quick, but can one get the same performance with multi-threaded applications?

Thanks.