That microbenchmark is old and quite imperfect; I'm pretty sure it's not actually measuring what it claims to measure. The point still stands. Creating threads

That microbenchmark is old and quite imperfect; I'm pretty sure it's not actually measuring what it claims to measure. The point still stands. Creating threads (at least in a normal OS like a modern Linux) is really fast. E.g., when processing a huge logfile it's faster to create one short-lived thread per each line than it is to use a thread pool with the producer-consumer routine and conditional variables.