Fedora and threading limit

[Tom 'Needs A Hat' Mitchell]

On Wed, Apr 28, 2004 at 10:16:24AM -0700, Guolin Cheng wrote:
....
> , I still can not quite understand, Since I can only use 2GB stack
> space. (256*8MB). Not 3GB.
> 
> The source of the thread-testing C file is from website
> http://www.linuxquestions.org/questions/showthread.php?s=&threadid=173680. 
>  
> 
> Any other easy ways to change system-wide threading limit? At least from
> Fedora Core 1's 256 to Redhat 8.0's 1533? Thanks A lot.

This seems to be stack size related (memory map).

On this FC1 box if I start with the default ulimits I get about 300
threads.  After ulimit -s 5120 I top out at 611 threads as reported by
the test 'c' code.

Since the kernel thread model has changed in nptl kernels I suspect
that changes in structures to manage threads and processes have
changed and the net memory footprint of a process will have changed.
The 2.6.5 kernel seems to permit about 30% more threads than the
current 2.4.22 kernel.

Since you seem to be seeing a 256 limit and I get ~300 to start I
wonder if there is also a physical memory computed limit component as
well.  How much DRAM?

You may get some more threads by tinkering with link options for text,
heap and stack but in the end this could prove to be something hard to
fix.  To me, anything with more than 100 threads seems to be in need
of a rewrite.  Like recursion threads are a marvelous model but tend
to be stack limited.  See: recursion.


-- 
	T o m  M i t c h e l l 
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