What's the cost of using hundreds of threads?

[Cameron Laird]

In article <4R5Vd.37291$%U2.33444 at lakeread01>,
Steve Holden  <steve at holdenweb.com> wrote:
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>> 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?
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>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.
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I'll support Mr. Zgoda's apocrypha.  The thing is, as so often
obtains, you're both right--early Windows flavors could dismember
themselves entertainingly when a process launched a few dozen
threads, but WinXP vastly improves that condition.

I assert that I could substantiate my claims with appropriate
references.  I choose not to do so today.