Mastering Delphi Programming: A Complete Reference Guide

Thread pooling

While starting a thread is much faster than creating a new process, it is still a relatively slow operation. It may easily take few milliseconds to create a new thread. Because in high-performance applications every millisecond counts, most task- and pattern-based libraries use a concept of a thread pool.

A thread pool is just a storage that manages unused threads. For example, let's say that your application—which was working in a single thread until now—has just created (and started) its first task. The Parallel Programming Library will then ask a thread pool to run that task. Unless you pass a custom thread pool parameter to TTask.Create or TTask.Run, a default thread pool will be used.

The thread pool will then create a ...