Linear search storm

This problem was encountered while working on a carefully designed multithreaded program, but it didn't have anything to do with the multithreading is hard mantra.

Context

I encountered this problem in a project that decoded satellite stream data and saved the detected contents to files. The system was supposed to be running 24/7 and to cope with the live data streams, they were delivered directly from a rather big satellite antenna. The program was supposed to run on a well-equipped Windows server, so machine power shouldn't have been a problem. The Qt framework was chosen for this project as a kind of portability layer.

I designed the architecture according to the share nothing principle. The...