Server :: Increase Multi Threaded Server Proficiency?

I am implementing a proxy server in c++. It is multithreaded(posix).Used CPU : Xeon(8core) Thread number : 8 One main thread, and other 7 thread created by the main thread. The main thread always listen to ports. When the main thread gets a client data it push the request in a queue[there are one queue(total 7) for each thread] based on ip and then give a signal to the appropriate thread. Then that thread gets the request from it's queue and process data and then forward the data to a appropriate destination.

There is another important thing, I assign each thread excluding the main thread to individual core by using affinity.The main thread listens to 5 ports. Test environment: We run the server. The client sends audio data at a particular rate.

1. The main thread CPU usage gets overloaded (above 80%) after a certain load from client.

2. Other cores remain about 0-10%.

The thing is that we want to distribute the load among all the cores equally by multithreading. But how can we do this ? Can the listening task of ports also be distributed ? I need an efficient algorithm for load balancing among threads. The data sent and receive rate of server is about 8.5MB/s. How can we improve this ? we are using gigabit LAN card. When the server only receive data from client it can receive data above 80MB/s. But when it both receives and sends data simultaneously it only manage upto 8.5MB/s.