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?

Accepted Answer

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.

Maximum number of threads per process in Linux?

Solution

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