Multithread socket programming

Question

Hello,
I'm new to socket programming world.
I've to send/receive the data from a external system thru socket. Since # of data to be processed is huge, I'm thinking to have multiple threads to send/receive thru socket. It looks like socket is NOT thread safe. So I'm thinking to have separate socket connection for each thread. Each thread will create the new socket connection and close it before it dies. Creating a new socket for each thread does not seem to be good practice to me.
Is this good design for socket programming? If not, please share your ideas.
I'm also thinking to have socket connecting pooling to re-use the connections. Is there any lib for doing this?
Thanks for the help

Answer 1

sorry i was busy on something else till now. thanks for reply.
Lets say that I've 100 request xml in the blocking queue. I would like to have producer/consumer model. producer will write the request from queue to channel and consumer will capture the response from channel . so sending/receiving happens simultaneously.
If I have single channel, I''m still not quite sure how i can read/write from channel at the same time. Please clarify with some examples.
i went thru few article and found following code to read/write. here looks like i have to write all 100 request first into channel and then be ready to read response. is my understanding correct?
// Check what event is available and deal with it
if (key.isConnectable()) {
// finishConnection(key);
} else if (key.isReadable()) {
this.read(key);
} else if (key.isWritable()) {
this.write(key);
}