What's the cost of using hundreds of threads?

[Steve Holden]

Jarek Zgoda wrote:
> Przemysław Różycki napisał(a):
> 
>> - Is there any 'upper boundary' that limits the number of threads? (is 
>> it python / OS related)
>> - Is that the sign of 'clumsy programming' - i.e. Is creating so many 
>> threads a bad habit? (I must say that it simplified the solution of my 
>> problem very much).
> 
> 
> I've read somewhere (I cann't recall where, though, was it MSDN?) that 
> Windows is not well suited to run more than 32 threads per process. Most 
> of the code I saw doesn't spawn more threads than a half of this.
> 
This is apocryphal. Do you have any hard evidence for this assertion?

Apache, for example, can easily spawn more threads under Windows, and 
I've written code that uses 200 threads with excellent performance. 
Things seem to slow down around the 2,000 mark for some reason I'm not 
familiar with.

regards
  Steve
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