The number of threads you create really does depend on the nature of the application. For our discussion here, we will consider which the application tends to be – CPU versus IO bound.
Earlier in this chapter (specifically within the sections on Design Motivation and Overlapping CPU with I/O), we mentioned the fact that a thread, in terms of its execution behavior, falls somewhere on a continuum, somewhere between two extremes: one extreme being a completely CPU-bound task and the other extreme being a completely I/O-bound task. The continuum may be visualized like this:
Fig 3: The CPU-bound/IO-bound continuum ...
