tags:

views:

89

answers:

2
+2  Q: 

Is there hard limit to the number of threads that can exist in a .NET process ?

Possible Duplicate:
Maximum number of threads in a .NET app?

Is there a limit on the number of threads we can create in a .NET application ?

I am assuming that the number of threads that can be created is limited by the amount of memory available since the threads' stack needs to be allocated. Please correct me if I am wrong. Are there other factors that limits the number of threads ? Or, is the number of threads limited to a specific number ?

How can I (roughly) calculate the maximum number of threads that can be created on a machine, if I know the machine specifications ?

+3  A: 

This is a duplicate of Maximum number of threads in a .NET app?.

Thorsten79  2010-01-24 14:05:02
Agreed that at the core it's a dupe but he's also mentioning that he's debugging an application that creates a lot of threads and seems to be implicitly asking for advice. Not sure if that makes the question different enough to leave open or not.
Brian Hasden  2010-01-24 14:28:07
+3  A: 

As always, Raymond Chen has the answer on his blog. Note that his test appears to have been run using unmanaged code. My guess is that there's nothing in the .NET framework that actually limits the number of threads per process and that the limit would be enforced by the O/S. If that's truly the case then his test is still valid.

Also, I'm not sure if it's different between 32-bit and 64-bit machines, I would imagine his results are dependent on RAM size and 32bit/64bit CPU along with possibly the number of CPUs. All that said, it looks like he was able to get 13000 threads created.

The big issue with 13k threads running is that the time spent context switching is sure to eat up all the available cpu and you're likely to be getting little to no work done.

If the application you're looking into is creating a lot of threads that are supposed to be doing intense work, you might not be getting a process hang as much as running into issues with the amount of context switching taking place. Obviously the most common issue in a multi-threaded application is a resource deadlock, but there are many tools available to troubleshoot that scenario.

Try the following links about deadlocks to determine if that's what you're actually running into:

Brian Hasden  2010-01-24 14:09:21
Thanks, this answer has been very helpful.
driis  2010-01-24 14:54:32

related questions

Displaying Flash content in a C# WinForms application
How to get the value of built, encoded ViewState?
Unhandled Exception Handler in .NET 1.1
How do I connect to a database and loop over a recordset in C#?
How do I most elegantly express left join with aggregate SQL as LINQ query
Get a new object instance from a Type in C#
.NET Testing Framework Advice
Automatically update version number
What is the difference between an int and an Integer in Java/C#?
How to write to Web.Config in Medium Trust ?
WinForms ComboBox data binding gotcha
How do you sort a C# dictionary by value?
Adding Scripting functionality to .NET applications
Floating Point Number parsing: Is there a Catch All algorithm?
How do I print an HTML document from a web service?
Decoding T-SQL CAST in C#/VB.net
Anatomy of a "Memory Leak"
How do I get a distinct, ordered list of names from a DataTable using Linq
Reliable Timer in a Console Application
How do I fill a DataSet or a DataTable from a LINQ query resultset ?
What's the difference between Math.Floor() and Math.Truncate() in .NET?
How do I calculate relative time?
How do I calculate someone's age in C#?
Are there any conversion tools for porting Visual J# code to C#?
When setting a form's opacity should I use a decimal or double?