Thanks Richard, I was wandering the strand real role, thanks for the explanation. As you pointed out the two life time static buffers one for read one for write should be the same as the life time of the socket attached to each session. In a server, there could be more than thousand session connections, in terms of resource management, would you think it is good or bad idea if to use a global buffer pool management class so the global buffers can be shared by all sessions? One thing is clear, that a fixed size array like boost::array<char, MAX_SIZE> readBuffer for each session async_read should not be used (which I am currently using), allocate and reserve more than thousands MAX_SIZE buffer in memory is not going to work. I'll have to see if it can be replaced by other boost simple smart buffer like boost::asio::buffer which can be converted to a raw pointer char* for feeding msgpack unpack input. (Vinnie did mention to use beast, might be another option, I have to see how complicated that will be)