Pthreads - High memory usage

Question

I am programming something in C that creates a lot of Pthreads in Linux on a 256Mb system. I usually have +200Mb free.

When I run the program with a low amount of thread

Answer 1

If you want lower overheads consider user-space threading technologies such as fibers, ala co-operative task management.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fiber_(computer_science)

http://www.evanjones.ca/software/threading.html

GNU Portable threads:

http://www.gnu.org/software/pth/

Boost C++ co-routines:

http://www.boost.org/doc/libs/1_60_0/libs/coroutine/doc/html/index.html

Windows-only fibers as an FYI:

http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/ms682661(v=vs.85).aspx

See the Wikipedia link for more example implementations.