OK, but it sounds like the main problem there is local disk access, which is the great satan anyway. You an generate a machine-hosing writeout workload using o

OK, but it sounds like the main problem there is local disk access, which is the great satan anyway. You an generate a machine-hosing writeout workload using only one thread on Linux, because Linux loves to starve readers if it can write instead. I think the unstated second dimension of your comment is that most operating system distributions come out of the installer with absolutely the wrong parameters for running many threads. I think the default thread stack size is 2MB still, and the socket buffers are all huge, and there are limits on how many processes you can have that make people think those limits are meaningful, when they're really not.