Sizing Thread Pool Executors

In our examples, we have used a cached thread pool that creates a new thread as needed or, if available, reuses the thread already used, but which completed its job and returned to the pool for a new assignment. We did not worry about too many threads created because our demo application had two worker threads at the most and they were quite short lived.

But in the case where an application does not have a fixed limit of the worker threads it might need or there is no good way to predict how much memory a thread may take or how long it can execute, setting a ceiling on the worker thread count prevents an unexpected degradation of the application performance, running out of memory or depletion of any other resources the worker threads use. If the thread behavior is extremely unpredictable, a single thread pool might be the only solution, with an option of using a custom thread pool executor (more about this last option is explained later). But in most of the cases...