Hands-On System Programming with Linux

How many threads can you create?

If you think about it, there must be some artificial constraint upon the number of threads that the underlying OS will allow an application to create; otherwise, system resources would get exhausted pretty quickly. In fact, this is not really something new; our whole discussion in Chapter 3, Resource Limits, was really about similar things.

With regard to threads (and processes), there are two (direct) limits that impact the number of threads that can exist at any given point in time:

• Per process resource limits: You will recall from our Chapter 3, Resource Limits, that there are two utilities to look up the currently defined resource limits: ulimit(1) and prlimit(1), the latter being the modern interface. ...