A while back Joe Duffy announced that they were changing the default max number of worker threads in the CLR threadpool in CLR 2.0 SP1. The change was to increase the limit 10 fold from 25 threads per processor per process to 250 per processor per process.

The basis of the change is that it is possible to deadlock the threadpool if you spawn and then wait for threadpool work from a threadpool thread (e.g. in processing an ASP.NET request). Increasing the size makes this occurance less likely (although doesn't remove the risk).

Although its not obvious, CLR 2.0 SP1 ships with .NET 3.5. So I was teaching Guerrilla .NET a couple of months ago and thought I'd demo the change by running  a project built under VS2005 then rebuild it under VS2008. What I hadn't expected (although on reflection its not that surprising) is that when I ran under 2005 on a machine with 2008 *installed* then 2005 also has the new behavior. In other words it patches the 2.0 CLR rather than being something that only affects new applications.

Why should we care? Well there are two main reasons we use threadpools. Firstly to remove the repeated cost of creating and destroying threads by repeatedly using a set of already created threads; secondly, it makes sure that we don't drown the machine in spawned threads when the application comes under load. Extra threads consume resources: the scheduler has to give them time and they default to 1Mb stack space.

And here is where I think the problem is. If you create a server side application, on 32 bit Windows, deploy it on an 8-way machine and put in under load, before this change you will cap out at 200 threads by default which is a reasonable (maybe a little high) number for IO bound processing. However, after the change this will cap out by default at 2000 threads. 2000 threads with 1Mb stack space means 2Gb of memory consumed by the threads. On 32 bit windows this is the total amount of addressable memory address space ... ouch! Say hello to Mr OutOfMemoryException.

So for existing applications this is a potentially breaking change. Your applications will have to take control of the max number of worker threads to ensure correct processing. ASP.NET already does this and you can adjust it via the <processModel> configuration element. In a windows service based application you have to make a call to ThreadPool.SetMaxThreads to control the threadpool.

To his credit Joe doen't pretend this change was the ideal resolution to a real-world problem but it is a change that will affect existing applcations as it is a patch to CLR 2.0 rather than a feature of a new version of the CLR