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LPC is indeed significantly more processor-intensive than most languages. However as you're never likely to reach 2000+ players online at once (nor even a fraction of that) outside of stress-testing purposes, I shall assume that this is more of a theoretical exercise. I shall therefore also assume that (1) you're not interested in compiling parts of the LPC code into C to speed it up, (2) you're not interested in writing the entire mud from scratch, in such a way as to be more suitable for handling such a large playerbase, and (3) you're not interested in just buying a more powerful processor.
Threads on a single cpu? In some cases they may result in better performance, by taking advantage of parallel execution paths. In other cases they may result in a worse performance, because of the additional task switching required. Overall, IMO, they're really not worthwhile except for specific tasks that might otherwise cause a bottleneck (eg dns lookups).
That's up to you. However there was some discussion about this on MUD-DEV a couple of years back, which you might find of interest:
Perhaps the easiest approach would be to effectively have a copy of the same mud running on several different servers, with each representing a different game world, and have those servers exchange essential data with each other. Thus players could travel between the game worlds, creating the image of a single "universe". This is not really a distributed server, although it achieves much the same result.
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