Mark Russinovich: This is the fourth post in my Pushing the Limits of Windows series that explores the boundaries of fundamental resources in Windows. This time, I’m going to discuss the limits on the maximum number of threads and processes supported on Windows. I’ll briefly describe the difference between a thread and a process, survey thread limits and then investigate process limits. I cover thread limits first since every active process has at least one thread (a process that’s terminated, but is kept referenced by a handle owned by another process won’t have any), so the limit on processes is directly affected by the caps that limit threads.
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