This should work fine. The goroutine making the system call that touches the NFS mount will consume an OS thread (an 'M' in Go terminology), but it will release

This should work fine. The goroutine making the system call that touches the NFS mount will consume an OS thread (an 'M' in Go terminology), but it will release its hold on other resources. Go uses as many OS threads as necessary to cope with running user code and doing OS system calls and so on (and starts new ones on demand). If you had lots of goroutines do lots of things that stalled on hung NFS mounts, you would build up a lot of OS threads (all sitting in system calls) and might run into limits there. But that's inevitable in any synchronous system call that can stall. (I'm the author of the linked-to article.)