Efficient multi-threaded server implementation in Qt

I'm planning a multithreaded server written in Qt. Each connection would be attended in a separate thread. Each of those threads would run its own event loop and use asynchronous sockets. I would like to dispatch a const value (for instance, a QString containing an event 开发者_StackOverflowstring) from the main thread to all the client threads in the most efficient possible way. The value should obviously be deleted when all the client threads have read it.

If I simply pass the data in a queued signal/slot connection, would this introduce a considerable overhead? Would it be more efficient to pass a QSharedPointer<QString>? What about passing a const QString* together with a QAtomicInt* for the reference counting and letting the thread decrease it and delete it when the reference counter reaches 0?

Somewhat off-topic, but please be aware that the one-thread-per-connection model could enable anyone able to connect to conduct a highly efficient denial of service attack against the system running the server, since the maximum number of threads that can be created on any system is limited. Also, if it's 32-bit, you can also starve address space since each thread gets its own stack. The default stack size varies acorss systems. On Win32 it's 1 MB, IIRC, so 2048 connections kept open and alive will eat 2 GB, i.e. the entire address space reserved for userspace (you can bump it up to 3 GB but that doesn't help much.)

For more details, check The C10K Problem, specifically the I/O Strategies -> Serve one client with each server thread chapter.

According to the documentation:

Behind the scenes, QString uses implicit sharing (copy-on-write) to reduce memory usage and to avoid the needless copying of data.

Based on this, you shouldn't have any more overhead sending copies of strings through the queued signal/slot connections than you would with your other proposed solutions. So I wouldn't worry about it until and unless it is a demonstrable performance problem.