Maximum number of threads per process in Linux?

Question

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 1

check the stack size per thread with ulimit, in my case Redhat Linux 2.6:

    ulimit -a
...
    stack size              (kbytes, -s) 10240

Each of your threads will get this amount of memory (10MB) assigned for it's stack. With a 32bit program and a maximum address space of 4GB, that is a maximum of only 4096MB / 10MB = 409 threads !!! Minus program code, minus heap-space will probably lead to an observed max. of 300 threads.

You should be able to raise this by compiling and running on 64bit or setting ulimit -s 8192 or even ulimit -s 4096. But if this is advisable is another discussion...