Disclaimer: I'm not an expert in this area, merely an interested bystander.
So, AFAIU the C10K approach is still the correct approach. Although perhaps with current hw and Linux being able to decently handle quite a lot of threads since NPTL, one should nowadays call it the C100K problem?
What has changed is a change in focus. Few people do entirely static sites anymore, and for static assets (images etc.) everybody uses nginx or other nonblocking approaches anyway. Perhaps also nginx/etc. as a reverse proxy. So there is no argument that nonblocking approaches are better for handling a lot of potentially slow connections.
But for the "core" functionality of a network application, that people are actually spending times programming rather than using an off the shelf solution like nginx, nonblocking vs. threads doesn't matter that much, there's all kinds of DB calls, CPU intensive work to do, etc. So people are (correctly) asking whether we can create nonblocking code but with an easier to use programming model (to the extent it does matter for performance) or whether to just use threads.
So, AFAIU the C10K approach is still the correct approach. Although perhaps with current hw and Linux being able to decently handle quite a lot of threads since NPTL, one should nowadays call it the C100K problem?
What has changed is a change in focus. Few people do entirely static sites anymore, and for static assets (images etc.) everybody uses nginx or other nonblocking approaches anyway. Perhaps also nginx/etc. as a reverse proxy. So there is no argument that nonblocking approaches are better for handling a lot of potentially slow connections.
But for the "core" functionality of a network application, that people are actually spending times programming rather than using an off the shelf solution like nginx, nonblocking vs. threads doesn't matter that much, there's all kinds of DB calls, CPU intensive work to do, etc. So people are (correctly) asking whether we can create nonblocking code but with an easier to use programming model (to the extent it does matter for performance) or whether to just use threads.