Threading limits

Bevan C. Bennett bevan at fulcrummicro.com
Fri Dec 19 20:28:05 UTC 2003


I have an application (Java based) that needs to generate a few thousand 
threads in order to complete, and I'm trying to get it to run on a fresh 
system with Fedora 1.0. However, it consistantly fails with a message 
about 'can't create native thread'. The same program with the same 
inputs does run on a hardware-identical system running the 'taroon' 
RHEL3.0 beta, but apparantly only barely.

Using the hand C-based "thread-limit" test, it looks like by default 
users can create 304 threads. If I use 'unlimit' to change the default 
stack size from 10240 to 'unlimited', this number increases to 1021 on 
fedora, but 1519 on taroon. I'd like to get it up closer to 10000...

The frustrating part is that all of the posts related to NPTL and 
threading that I've been able to find online are from people who, for 
example, can't get more than 32,000 threads going... but none ofthe 
discussions seem relevant to whatever is generating my much smaller limit.

On both systems, the following values are identical:
/proc/sys/kernel/pid_max:     32768
/proc/sys/kernel/threads-max: 14336
/proc/sys/vm/max_map_count:   65536

Increasing any or all of these seems to make no difference.

If someone could point me in the correct direction, I'd be greatly 
appreciative...





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