Secure Programming Cookbook for C and C++

13.7. Guarding Against Spawning Too Many Threads

Problem

You need to prevent too many threads from being spawned, a problem that could potentially result in a denial of service owing to exhausted system resources.

Solution

A common mistake in writing multithreaded programs is to create a new thread every time a new task is initiated; this is often overkill. Often, a "pool” of threads can be used to perform simple tasks. A set number of threads are created when the program initializes, and these threads exist for the lifetime of the process. Whenever a task needs to be performed on another thread, the task can be queued. When a thread is available, it can perform the task, then go back to waiting for another task to perform.

On Windows 2000 and greater, there is a new API function called QueueUserWorkItem( ) that essentially implements the same functionality as that presented in this recipe. Unfortunately, that function does not exist on older versions of Windows. Our solution has the advantage of being portable to such older systems. However, if you are writing code that is guaranteed always to be running on a system that supports the API, you may wish to use it instead. Regardless of whether you use the API or the code we present in this recipe, the concepts are the same, and the bulk of our discussion still applies.

Discussion

Suppose that the program using thread spawns is a network server, and it spawns a new thread for each connection it receives, an attacker can quickly flood ...