🚀 go-pugleaf

On Thu, 13 Mar 2003 02:27:02 -0600, "Ted Tripp" <ttripp@skypoint.com>
wrote:

>Another question, I vaguely recall reading that threads are initialized with
>a certain (default?) amount of memory.  I seem to recall something like
>1MB--maybe this was a nonwindows OS...  Anyway, if true, can this, should
>this, be tweaked?  If not true, NM.
>

That is the stack size.  Reserving a stack requires part of your
virtual address space (1MB is not necessarily committed, there is a
guard page on the stack that will trigger the stack growth).  Since
the user virtual address space is limited (2GB on most 32-bit versions
of Windows, 3GB on some, not a problem on 64-bit Windows) this places
an upper limit on the number of threads you can have.  You can reduce
the amount of stack a particular thread gets, but approaching 2000
threads is not a good thing anyway.  

Even 100 is a large number of threads.  If your threads are often
blocked waiting for I/O it doesn't hurt to have quite a few to
simplify the sturcture of your code.  If all of the hundreds of
threads are CPU bound, some percentage of the available CPU time will
be wasted with the administrative overhead of switching between the
threads.  But considering how fast the CPU is compared to everything
else in a system including the memory...

Chris Hill
Chris244@aol.com