One of the big pains of my work day is our accounting system which, while being great at what it does well, can be abysmally slow to respond to queries (the sim

One of the big pains of my work day is our accounting system which, while being great at what it does well, can be abysmally slow to respond to queries (the simple question of how much of X do we own now, takes it around three minutes to answer...). We know from experience though that internally it can deal with up to three requests at a time without it slowing down. If I only had one thread then three requests (which block) would take me nine minutes to process, with three threads I can get all the results back in three minutes.