Maximum number of threads per process in Linux?

linux multithreading
user60008667 picture user60008667 · Dec 5, 2008 · Viewed 407.6k times · Source

What is the maximum number of threads that can be created by a process under Linux?

How (if possible) can this value be modified?

Answer

Robert Gamble picture Robert Gamble · Dec 5, 2008

Linux doesn't have a separate threads per process limit, just a limit on the total number of processes on the system (threads are essentially just processes with a shared address space on Linux) which you can view like this:

cat /proc/sys/kernel/threads-max

The default is the number of memory pages/4. You can increase this like:

echo 100000 > /proc/sys/kernel/threads-max

There is also a limit on the number of processes (and hence threads) that a single user may create, see ulimit/getrlimit for details regarding these limits.

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