How many threads is too many

Question

I am writing a server  and I send each action of into a separate thread when the request is received  I do this because almost every request makes a database query  I am using a threadpool library to cut down on construction destruction of threads  My question is  what is a good cutoff point for I O threads like these  I know it would just be a rough estimate  but are we talking hundreds  Thousands  How would I go about figuring out what this cutoff would be   EDIT  Thank you all for your responses  it seems like I am just going to have to test it to find out my thread count ceiling  The question is though  how do I know I ve hit that ceiling  What exactly should I measure

User · Answer

One thing to consider is how many cores exist on the machine that will be executing the code   That represents a hard limit on how many threads can be proceeding at any given time   However  if  as in your case  threads are expected to be frequently waiting for a database to execute a query  you will probably want to tune your threads based on how many concurrent queries the database can process

User · Answer

As many threads as the CPU cores is what I ve heard very often

User · Answer

ryeguy  I am currently developing a similar application and my threads number is set to 15  Unfortunately if I increase it at 20  it crashes  So  yes  I think the best way to handle this is to measure whether or not your current configuration allows more or less than a number X of threads

User · Answer

I ve written a number of heavily multi-threaded apps   I generally allow the number of potential threads to be specified by a configuration file   When I ve tuned for specific customers  I ve set the number high enough that my utilization of the all the CPU cores was pretty high  but not so high that I ran into memory problems  these were 32-bit operating systems at the time    Put differently  once you reach some bottleneck be it CPU  database throughput  disk throughput  etc  adding more threads won t increase the overall performance   But until you hit that point  add more threads   Note that this assumes the system s  in question are dedicated to your app  and you don t have to play nicely  avoid starving  other apps

User · Answer

As Pax rightly said  measure  don t guess  That what I did for DNSwitness and the results were suprising  the ideal number of threads was much higher than I thought  something like 15 000 threads to get the fastest results   Of course  it depends on many things  that s why you must measure yourself   Complete measures  in French only  in Combien de fils d ex  cution

User · Answer

I think this is a bit of a dodge to your question  but why not fork them into processes   My understanding of networking  from the hazy days of yore  I don t really code networks at all  was that each incoming connection can be handled as a separate process  because then if someone does something nasty in your process  it doesn t nuke the entire program

User · Answer

In most cases you should allow the thread pool to handle this  If you post some code or give more details it might be easier to see if there is some reason the default behavior of the thread pool would not be best   You can find more information on how this should work here  http   en wikipedia org wiki Thread pool pattern

User · Answer

As Pax rightly said  measure  don t guess  That what I did for DNSwitness and the results were suprising  the ideal number of threads was much higher than I thought  something like 15 000 threads to get the fastest results   Of course  it depends on many things  that s why you must measure yourself   Complete measures  in French only  in Combien de fils d ex  cution

User · Answer

ryeguy  I am currently developing a similar application and my threads number is set to 15  Unfortunately if I increase it at 20  it crashes  So  yes  I think the best way to handle this is to measure whether or not your current configuration allows more or less than a number X of threads

User · Answer

This question has been discussed quite thoroughly and I didn t get a chance to read all the responses  But here s few things to take into consideration while looking at the upper limit on number of simultaneous threads that can co-exist peacefully in a given system     Thread Stack Size   In Linux the default thread stack size is 8MB  you can use ulimit -a to find it out    Max Virtual memory that a given OS variant supports  Linux Kernel 2 4 supports a memory address space of 2 GB  with Kernel 2 6   I a bit bigger  3GB     1  shows the calculations for the max number of threads per given Max VM Supported  For 2 4 it turns out to be about 255 threads  for 2 6 the number is a bit larger   What kindda kernel scheduler you have   Comparing Linux 2 4 kernel scheduler with 2 6   the later gives you a O 1  scheduling with no dependence upon number of tasks existing in a system while first one is more of a O n   So also the SMP Capabilities of the kernel schedule also play a good role in max number of sustainable threads in a system     Now you can tune your stack size to incorporate more threads but then you have to take into account the overheads of thread management creation destruction and scheduling    You can enforce CPU Affinity to a given process as well as to a given thread to tie them down to specific CPUs to avoid thread migration overheads between the CPUs and avoid cold cash issues    Note that one can create thousands of threads at his her wish   but when Linux runs out of VM it just randomly starts killing processes  thus threads   This is to keep the utility profile from being maxed out   The utility function tells about system wide utility for a given amount of resources  With a constant resources in this case CPU Cycles and Memory  the utility curve flattens out with more and more number of tasks     I am sure windows  kernel scheduler also does something of this sort to deal with over utilization of the resources   1   http   adywicaksono wordpress com 2007 07 10 i-can-not-create-more-than-255-threads-on-linux-what-is-the-solutions

User · Answer

As Pax rightly said  measure  don t guess  That what I did for DNSwitness and the results were suprising  the ideal number of threads was much higher than I thought  something like 15 000 threads to get the fastest results   Of course  it depends on many things  that s why you must measure yourself   Complete measures  in French only  in Combien de fils d ex  cution

User · Answer

As many threads as the CPU cores is what I ve heard very often

User · Answer

If your threads are performing any kind of resource-intensive work  CPU Disk  then you ll rarely see benefits beyond one or two  and too many will kill performance very quickly   The  best-case  is that your later threads will stall while the first ones complete  or some will have low-overhead blocks on resources with low contention  Worst-case is that you start thrashing the cache disk network and your overall throughput drops through the floor   A good solution is to place requests in a pool that are then dispatched to worker threads from a thread-pool  and yes  avoiding continuous thread creation destruction is a great first step     The number of active threads in this pool can then be tweaked and scaled based on the findings of your profiling  the hardware you are running on  and other things that may be occurring on the machine

User · Answer

As many threads as the CPU cores is what I ve heard very often

User · Answer

This question has been discussed quite thoroughly and I didn t get a chance to read all the responses  But here s few things to take into consideration while looking at the upper limit on number of simultaneous threads that can co-exist peacefully in a given system     Thread Stack Size   In Linux the default thread stack size is 8MB  you can use ulimit -a to find it out    Max Virtual memory that a given OS variant supports  Linux Kernel 2 4 supports a memory address space of 2 GB  with Kernel 2 6   I a bit bigger  3GB     1  shows the calculations for the max number of threads per given Max VM Supported  For 2 4 it turns out to be about 255 threads  for 2 6 the number is a bit larger   What kindda kernel scheduler you have   Comparing Linux 2 4 kernel scheduler with 2 6   the later gives you a O 1  scheduling with no dependence upon number of tasks existing in a system while first one is more of a O n   So also the SMP Capabilities of the kernel schedule also play a good role in max number of sustainable threads in a system     Now you can tune your stack size to incorporate more threads but then you have to take into account the overheads of thread management creation destruction and scheduling    You can enforce CPU Affinity to a given process as well as to a given thread to tie them down to specific CPUs to avoid thread migration overheads between the CPUs and avoid cold cash issues    Note that one can create thousands of threads at his her wish   but when Linux runs out of VM it just randomly starts killing processes  thus threads   This is to keep the utility profile from being maxed out   The utility function tells about system wide utility for a given amount of resources  With a constant resources in this case CPU Cycles and Memory  the utility curve flattens out with more and more number of tasks     I am sure windows  kernel scheduler also does something of this sort to deal with over utilization of the resources   1   http   adywicaksono wordpress com 2007 07 10 i-can-not-create-more-than-255-threads-on-linux-what-is-the-solutions

User · Answer

ryeguy  I am currently developing a similar application and my threads number is set to 15  Unfortunately if I increase it at 20  it crashes  So  yes  I think the best way to handle this is to measure whether or not your current configuration allows more or less than a number X of threads

User · Answer

ryeguy  I am currently developing a similar application and my threads number is set to 15  Unfortunately if I increase it at 20  it crashes  So  yes  I think the best way to handle this is to measure whether or not your current configuration allows more or less than a number X of threads

User · Answer

If your threads are performing any kind of resource-intensive work  CPU Disk  then you ll rarely see benefits beyond one or two  and too many will kill performance very quickly   The  best-case  is that your later threads will stall while the first ones complete  or some will have low-overhead blocks on resources with low contention  Worst-case is that you start thrashing the cache disk network and your overall throughput drops through the floor   A good solution is to place requests in a pool that are then dispatched to worker threads from a thread-pool  and yes  avoiding continuous thread creation destruction is a great first step     The number of active threads in this pool can then be tweaked and scaled based on the findings of your profiling  the hardware you are running on  and other things that may be occurring on the machine

User · Answer

In most cases you should allow the thread pool to handle this  If you post some code or give more details it might be easier to see if there is some reason the default behavior of the thread pool would not be best   You can find more information on how this should work here  http   en wikipedia org wiki Thread pool pattern

User · Answer

One thing to consider is how many cores exist on the machine that will be executing the code   That represents a hard limit on how many threads can be proceeding at any given time   However  if  as in your case  threads are expected to be frequently waiting for a database to execute a query  you will probably want to tune your threads based on how many concurrent queries the database can process

User · Answer

I think this is a bit of a dodge to your question  but why not fork them into processes   My understanding of networking  from the hazy days of yore  I don t really code networks at all  was that each incoming connection can be handled as a separate process  because then if someone does something nasty in your process  it doesn t nuke the entire program

User · Answer

As many threads as the CPU cores is what I ve heard very often

User · Answer

One thing you should keep in mind is that python  at least the C based version  uses what s called a global interpreter lock that can have a huge impact on performance on mult-core machines   If you really need the most out of multithreaded python  you might want to consider using Jython or something

User · Answer

If your threads are performing any kind of resource-intensive work  CPU Disk  then you ll rarely see benefits beyond one or two  and too many will kill performance very quickly   The  best-case  is that your later threads will stall while the first ones complete  or some will have low-overhead blocks on resources with low contention  Worst-case is that you start thrashing the cache disk network and your overall throughput drops through the floor   A good solution is to place requests in a pool that are then dispatched to worker threads from a thread-pool  and yes  avoiding continuous thread creation destruction is a great first step     The number of active threads in this pool can then be tweaked and scaled based on the findings of your profiling  the hardware you are running on  and other things that may be occurring on the machine

User · Answer

In most cases you should allow the thread pool to handle this  If you post some code or give more details it might be easier to see if there is some reason the default behavior of the thread pool would not be best   You can find more information on how this should work here  http   en wikipedia org wiki Thread pool pattern

User · Answer

Some people would say that two threads is too many - I m not quite in that camp  -   Here s my advice  measure  don t guess  One suggestion is to make it configurable and initially set it to 100  then release your software to the wild and monitor what happens   If your thread usage peaks at 3  then 100 is too much  If it remains at 100 for most of the day  bump it up to 200 and see what happens   You could actually have your code itself monitor usage and adjust the configuration for the next time it starts but that s probably overkill     For clarification and elaboration   I m not advocating rolling your own thread pooling subsystem  by all means use the one you have  But  since you were asking about a good cut-off point for threads  I assume your thread pool implementation has the ability to limit the maximum number of threads created  which is a good thing    I ve written thread and database connection pooling code and they have the following features  which I believe are essential for performance     a minimum number of active threads  a maximum number of threads  shutting down threads that haven t been used for a while    The first sets a baseline for minimum performance in terms of the thread pool client  this number of threads is always available for use   The second sets a restriction on resource usage by active threads  The third returns you to the baseline in quiet times so as to minimise resource use   You need to balance the resource usage of having unused threads  A  against the resource usage of not having enough threads to do the work  B     A  is generally memory usage  stacks and so on  since a thread doing no work will not be using much of the CPU   B  will generally be a delay in the processing of requests as they arrive as you need to wait for a thread to become available   That s why you measure  As you state  the vast majority of your threads will be waiting for a response from the database so they won t be running  There are two factors that affect how many threads you should allow for   The first is the number of DB connections available  This may be a hard limit unless you can increase it at the DBMS - I m going to assume your DBMS can take an unlimited number of connections in this case  although you should ideally be measuring that as well    Then  the number of threads you should have depend on your historical use  The minimum you should have running is the minimum number that you ve ever had running   A   with an absolute minimum of  for example  and make it configurable just like A  5   The maximum number of threads should be your historical maximum   B    You should also be monitoring for behaviour changes  If  for some reason  your usage goes to 100  of available for a significant time  so that it would affect the performance of clients   you should bump up the maximum allowed until it s once again B  higher     In response to the  what exactly should I measure   question   What you should measure specifically is the maximum amount of threads in concurrent use  e g   waiting on a return from the DB call  under load  Then add a safety factor of 10  for example  emphasised  since other posters seem to take my examples as fixed recommendations    In addition  this should be done in the production environment for tuning  It s okay to get an estimate beforehand but you never know what production will throw your way  which is why all these things should be configurable at runtime   This is to catch a situation such as unexpected doubling of the client calls coming in

User · Answer

If your threads are performing any kind of resource-intensive work  CPU Disk  then you ll rarely see benefits beyond one or two  and too many will kill performance very quickly   The  best-case  is that your later threads will stall while the first ones complete  or some will have low-overhead blocks on resources with low contention  Worst-case is that you start thrashing the cache disk network and your overall throughput drops through the floor   A good solution is to place requests in a pool that are then dispatched to worker threads from a thread-pool  and yes  avoiding continuous thread creation destruction is a great first step     The number of active threads in this pool can then be tweaked and scaled based on the findings of your profiling  the hardware you are running on  and other things that may be occurring on the machine

User · Answer

Some people would say that two threads is too many - I m not quite in that camp  -   Here s my advice  measure  don t guess  One suggestion is to make it configurable and initially set it to 100  then release your software to the wild and monitor what happens   If your thread usage peaks at 3  then 100 is too much  If it remains at 100 for most of the day  bump it up to 200 and see what happens   You could actually have your code itself monitor usage and adjust the configuration for the next time it starts but that s probably overkill     For clarification and elaboration   I m not advocating rolling your own thread pooling subsystem  by all means use the one you have  But  since you were asking about a good cut-off point for threads  I assume your thread pool implementation has the ability to limit the maximum number of threads created  which is a good thing    I ve written thread and database connection pooling code and they have the following features  which I believe are essential for performance     a minimum number of active threads  a maximum number of threads  shutting down threads that haven t been used for a while    The first sets a baseline for minimum performance in terms of the thread pool client  this number of threads is always available for use   The second sets a restriction on resource usage by active threads  The third returns you to the baseline in quiet times so as to minimise resource use   You need to balance the resource usage of having unused threads  A  against the resource usage of not having enough threads to do the work  B     A  is generally memory usage  stacks and so on  since a thread doing no work will not be using much of the CPU   B  will generally be a delay in the processing of requests as they arrive as you need to wait for a thread to become available   That s why you measure  As you state  the vast majority of your threads will be waiting for a response from the database so they won t be running  There are two factors that affect how many threads you should allow for   The first is the number of DB connections available  This may be a hard limit unless you can increase it at the DBMS - I m going to assume your DBMS can take an unlimited number of connections in this case  although you should ideally be measuring that as well    Then  the number of threads you should have depend on your historical use  The minimum you should have running is the minimum number that you ve ever had running   A   with an absolute minimum of  for example  and make it configurable just like A  5   The maximum number of threads should be your historical maximum   B    You should also be monitoring for behaviour changes  If  for some reason  your usage goes to 100  of available for a significant time  so that it would affect the performance of clients   you should bump up the maximum allowed until it s once again B  higher     In response to the  what exactly should I measure   question   What you should measure specifically is the maximum amount of threads in concurrent use  e g   waiting on a return from the DB call  under load  Then add a safety factor of 10  for example  emphasised  since other posters seem to take my examples as fixed recommendations    In addition  this should be done in the production environment for tuning  It s okay to get an estimate beforehand but you never know what production will throw your way  which is why all these things should be configurable at runtime   This is to catch a situation such as unexpected doubling of the client calls coming in

User · Answer

I think this is a bit of a dodge to your question  but why not fork them into processes   My understanding of networking  from the hazy days of yore  I don t really code networks at all  was that each incoming connection can be handled as a separate process  because then if someone does something nasty in your process  it doesn t nuke the entire program

User · Answer

I think this is a bit of a dodge to your question  but why not fork them into processes   My understanding of networking  from the hazy days of yore  I don t really code networks at all  was that each incoming connection can be handled as a separate process  because then if someone does something nasty in your process  it doesn t nuke the entire program

User · Answer

Some people would say that two threads is too many - I m not quite in that camp  -   Here s my advice  measure  don t guess  One suggestion is to make it configurable and initially set it to 100  then release your software to the wild and monitor what happens   If your thread usage peaks at 3  then 100 is too much  If it remains at 100 for most of the day  bump it up to 200 and see what happens   You could actually have your code itself monitor usage and adjust the configuration for the next time it starts but that s probably overkill     For clarification and elaboration   I m not advocating rolling your own thread pooling subsystem  by all means use the one you have  But  since you were asking about a good cut-off point for threads  I assume your thread pool implementation has the ability to limit the maximum number of threads created  which is a good thing    I ve written thread and database connection pooling code and they have the following features  which I believe are essential for performance     a minimum number of active threads  a maximum number of threads  shutting down threads that haven t been used for a while    The first sets a baseline for minimum performance in terms of the thread pool client  this number of threads is always available for use   The second sets a restriction on resource usage by active threads  The third returns you to the baseline in quiet times so as to minimise resource use   You need to balance the resource usage of having unused threads  A  against the resource usage of not having enough threads to do the work  B     A  is generally memory usage  stacks and so on  since a thread doing no work will not be using much of the CPU   B  will generally be a delay in the processing of requests as they arrive as you need to wait for a thread to become available   That s why you measure  As you state  the vast majority of your threads will be waiting for a response from the database so they won t be running  There are two factors that affect how many threads you should allow for   The first is the number of DB connections available  This may be a hard limit unless you can increase it at the DBMS - I m going to assume your DBMS can take an unlimited number of connections in this case  although you should ideally be measuring that as well    Then  the number of threads you should have depend on your historical use  The minimum you should have running is the minimum number that you ve ever had running   A   with an absolute minimum of  for example  and make it configurable just like A  5   The maximum number of threads should be your historical maximum   B    You should also be monitoring for behaviour changes  If  for some reason  your usage goes to 100  of available for a significant time  so that it would affect the performance of clients   you should bump up the maximum allowed until it s once again B  higher     In response to the  what exactly should I measure   question   What you should measure specifically is the maximum amount of threads in concurrent use  e g   waiting on a return from the DB call  under load  Then add a safety factor of 10  for example  emphasised  since other posters seem to take my examples as fixed recommendations    In addition  this should be done in the production environment for tuning  It s okay to get an estimate beforehand but you never know what production will throw your way  which is why all these things should be configurable at runtime   This is to catch a situation such as unexpected doubling of the client calls coming in

User · Answer

One thing you should keep in mind is that python  at least the C based version  uses what s called a global interpreter lock that can have a huge impact on performance on mult-core machines   If you really need the most out of multithreaded python  you might want to consider using Jython or something

User · Answer

As Pax rightly said  measure  don t guess  That what I did for DNSwitness and the results were suprising  the ideal number of threads was much higher than I thought  something like 15 000 threads to get the fastest results   Of course  it depends on many things  that s why you must measure yourself   Complete measures  in French only  in Combien de fils d ex  cution

User · Answer

In most cases you should allow the thread pool to handle this  If you post some code or give more details it might be easier to see if there is some reason the default behavior of the thread pool would not be best   You can find more information on how this should work here  http   en wikipedia org wiki Thread pool pattern

User · Answer

Some people would say that two threads is too many - I m not quite in that camp  -   Here s my advice  measure  don t guess  One suggestion is to make it configurable and initially set it to 100  then release your software to the wild and monitor what happens   If your thread usage peaks at 3  then 100 is too much  If it remains at 100 for most of the day  bump it up to 200 and see what happens   You could actually have your code itself monitor usage and adjust the configuration for the next time it starts but that s probably overkill     For clarification and elaboration   I m not advocating rolling your own thread pooling subsystem  by all means use the one you have  But  since you were asking about a good cut-off point for threads  I assume your thread pool implementation has the ability to limit the maximum number of threads created  which is a good thing    I ve written thread and database connection pooling code and they have the following features  which I believe are essential for performance     a minimum number of active threads  a maximum number of threads  shutting down threads that haven t been used for a while    The first sets a baseline for minimum performance in terms of the thread pool client  this number of threads is always available for use   The second sets a restriction on resource usage by active threads  The third returns you to the baseline in quiet times so as to minimise resource use   You need to balance the resource usage of having unused threads  A  against the resource usage of not having enough threads to do the work  B     A  is generally memory usage  stacks and so on  since a thread doing no work will not be using much of the CPU   B  will generally be a delay in the processing of requests as they arrive as you need to wait for a thread to become available   That s why you measure  As you state  the vast majority of your threads will be waiting for a response from the database so they won t be running  There are two factors that affect how many threads you should allow for   The first is the number of DB connections available  This may be a hard limit unless you can increase it at the DBMS - I m going to assume your DBMS can take an unlimited number of connections in this case  although you should ideally be measuring that as well    Then  the number of threads you should have depend on your historical use  The minimum you should have running is the minimum number that you ve ever had running   A   with an absolute minimum of  for example  and make it configurable just like A  5   The maximum number of threads should be your historical maximum   B    You should also be monitoring for behaviour changes  If  for some reason  your usage goes to 100  of available for a significant time  so that it would affect the performance of clients   you should bump up the maximum allowed until it s once again B  higher     In response to the  what exactly should I measure   question   What you should measure specifically is the maximum amount of threads in concurrent use  e g   waiting on a return from the DB call  under load  Then add a safety factor of 10  for example  emphasised  since other posters seem to take my examples as fixed recommendations    In addition  this should be done in the production environment for tuning  It s okay to get an estimate beforehand but you never know what production will throw your way  which is why all these things should be configurable at runtime   This is to catch a situation such as unexpected doubling of the client calls coming in

User · Answer

The  big iron  answer is generally one thread per limited resource -- processor  CPU bound   arm  I O bound   etc -- but that only works if you can route the work to the correct thread for the resource to be accessed   Where that s not possible  consider that you have fungible resources  CPUs  and non-fungible resources  arms    For CPUs it s not critical to assign each thread to a specific CPU  though it helps with cache management   but for arms  if you can t assign a thread to the arm  you get into queuing theory and what s optimal number to keep arms busy   Generally I m thinking that if you can t route requests based on the arm used  then having 2-3 threads per arm is going to be about right   A complication comes about when the unit of work passed to the thread doesn t execute a reasonably atomic unit of work   Eg  you may have the thread at one point access the disk  at another point wait on a network   This increases the number of  cracks  where additional threads can get in and do useful work  but it also increases the opportunity for additional threads to pollute each other s caches  etc  and bog the system down   Of course  you must weigh all this against the  weight  of a thread   Unfortunately  most systems have very heavyweight threads  and what they call  lightweight threads  often aren t threads at all   so it s better to err on the low side   What I ve seen in practice is that very subtle differences can make an enormous difference in how many threads are optimal   In particular  cache issues and lock conflicts can greatly limit the amount of practical concurrency

User · Answer

The  big iron  answer is generally one thread per limited resource -- processor  CPU bound   arm  I O bound   etc -- but that only works if you can route the work to the correct thread for the resource to be accessed   Where that s not possible  consider that you have fungible resources  CPUs  and non-fungible resources  arms    For CPUs it s not critical to assign each thread to a specific CPU  though it helps with cache management   but for arms  if you can t assign a thread to the arm  you get into queuing theory and what s optimal number to keep arms busy   Generally I m thinking that if you can t route requests based on the arm used  then having 2-3 threads per arm is going to be about right   A complication comes about when the unit of work passed to the thread doesn t execute a reasonably atomic unit of work   Eg  you may have the thread at one point access the disk  at another point wait on a network   This increases the number of  cracks  where additional threads can get in and do useful work  but it also increases the opportunity for additional threads to pollute each other s caches  etc  and bog the system down   Of course  you must weigh all this against the  weight  of a thread   Unfortunately  most systems have very heavyweight threads  and what they call  lightweight threads  often aren t threads at all   so it s better to err on the low side   What I ve seen in practice is that very subtle differences can make an enormous difference in how many threads are optimal   In particular  cache issues and lock conflicts can greatly limit the amount of practical concurrency

User · Answer

I ve written a number of heavily multi-threaded apps   I generally allow the number of potential threads to be specified by a configuration file   When I ve tuned for specific customers  I ve set the number high enough that my utilization of the all the CPU cores was pretty high  but not so high that I ran into memory problems  these were 32-bit operating systems at the time    Put differently  once you reach some bottleneck be it CPU  database throughput  disk throughput  etc  adding more threads won t increase the overall performance   But until you hit that point  add more threads   Note that this assumes the system s  in question are dedicated to your app  and you don t have to play nicely  avoid starving  other apps

User · Answer

One thing to consider is how many cores exist on the machine that will be executing the code   That represents a hard limit on how many threads can be proceeding at any given time   However  if  as in your case  threads are expected to be frequently waiting for a database to execute a query  you will probably want to tune your threads based on how many concurrent queries the database can process

User · Answer

One thing to consider is how many cores exist on the machine that will be executing the code   That represents a hard limit on how many threads can be proceeding at any given time   However  if  as in your case  threads are expected to be frequently waiting for a database to execute a query  you will probably want to tune your threads based on how many concurrent queries the database can process

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