pthreads and resources

I'm working on a server for a chat program i'm writing, and so far i have it structured to where a loop in main does nothing but sit and wait for a connection, set up the socket stuff, and create a new thread to handle the client, etc.. I've written a little app that shows me the max number of threads per process i'm able to have from limits.h, and it comes up as 16384.

Now, I know I definitely won't have that many users when i first launch the program, but I want the program to be as scalable as possible. I know that even if I were to have 16364 clients connected and using the service, the server would have plenty of ram left, and I defiitely don't want to waste those resources.

What is it exactly that limits the number of possible pthreads if ram isn't the issue?

What could I do to overcome this obstacle? Would a mixture of forks and pthreads be the best solution? Maybe have a top level process that does nothing but create more processes when the other(s) have used up all available pthreads? I'd appreciate any help you could offer.

How about formatting your posts for readability?

Done. Thanks for the help :/