HAProxy implements an event-driven, mono-process model which enables support for very high number of simultaneous connections at very high speeds. Multi-process or multi-threaded models can rarely cope with thousands of connections because of memory limits, system scheduler limits, and lock contention everywhere. Event-driven models do not have these problems because implementing all the tasks in user-space allows a finer resource and time management. The down side is that those programs generally don't scale well on multi-processor systems. That's the reason why they must be optimized to get the most work done from every CPU cycle.