Setting Ideal size of Thread Pool [duplicate]

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Ok. Ideally assuming your threads do not have locking such that they do not block each other (independent of each other) and you can assume that the work load (processing) is same, then it turns out that, have a pool size of Runtime.getRuntime().availableProcessors() or availableProcessors() + 1 gives the best results.

But say, if threads interfere with each other or have I/O inlvolved, then Amadhal’s law explains pretty well. From wiki,

Amdahl’s law states that if P is the proportion of a program that can be made parallel (i.e., benefit from parallelization), and (1 − P) is the proportion that cannot be parallelized (remains serial), then the maximum speedup that can be achieved by using N processors is

Amadhal law

In your case, based upon the number of cores available, and what work they precisely do (pure computation? I/O? hold locks? blocked for some resource? etc..), you need to come up with the solution based upon above parameters.

For example: Some months back I was involved with collecting data from numeral web-sites. My machine was 4-core and I had a pool size of 4. But because the operation was purely I/O and my net speed was decent, I realized that I had best performance with a pool size of 7. And that is because, the threads were not fighting for computational power, but for I/O. So I could leverage the fact that more threads can contest for core positively.

PS: I suggest, going through the chapter Performance from the book – Java Concurrency in Practice by Brian Goetz. It deals with such matters in detail.

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