How many threads are too many?

[Aahz]

In article <d7vcki$5e7$1 at solaris.cc.vt.edu>,
rbt  <rbt at athop1.ath.vt.edu> wrote:
>
>When designing a threaded application, is there a pratical limit on  the 
>number of threads that one should use or is there a way to set it up so 
>that the OS handles the number of threads automatically? I am developing 
>on 32-bit x86 Intel systems with python 2.4.1. The OS will be Linux and 
>Windows.

The practical limit is somewhere between five and a hundred threads,
depending on what you're doing.  The more I/O you're doing, the more
greater numbers of threads will benefit you.

>I have an older app that used to work fine (254 threads) on early 2.3 
>Pythons, but now, I get this error with 2.4.1 and 2.3.5:
>
>Traceback (most recent call last):
>   File "net_queue_and_threads.py", line 124, in ?
>     thread.start()
>   File "/usr/lib/python2.3/threading.py", line 416, in start
>     _start_new_thread(self.__bootstrap, ())
>thread.error: can't start new thread

That's rather odd.  Which OS is this?  Did you build Python yourself or
did you download it?
-- 
Aahz (aahz at pythoncraft.com)           <*>         http://www.pythoncraft.com/

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