I don't think threads are a poor idea but they have sharp edges. I work on multithreaded software and I get 31,516,776 synchronizations per second with a lock

I don't think threads are a poor idea but they have sharp edges. I work on multithreaded software and I get 31,516,776 synchronizations per second with a lock free algorithm and 12 threads and 31,565,052 on the lock benchmark. When the threads are increased to 100 (contention) the lock benchmark does 3,419,271 requests per second whereas the lock free algorithm does 19,926,428 so the contention hurts them both but the lock free benchmark scales far better. Threads aren't bad. The domain is not easy.