Random Screenshot: Microsoft Employees Hogging Your Threads
The recent .NET Rocks! “Jeffrey Richter on the Windows Memory Model” (#361) inspired me to take a look at what Outlook 2007 was doing on my virtual machine. Incredible: zero CPU usage but almost 30 threads open! According to Jeffrey Richter this is just terrible waste—and can make “wacko conspiracy theorists” like me to use this screenshot as evidence for how Microsoft would collude with hardware vendors to ‘predict earnings’ by guaranteeing that hardware will be bought—especially RAM.
The ideal laid out on the interview is that software should be designed and written such that the number of threads used should equal the number of CPUs on the machine. I can’t wait to stumble upon the offhand comment from a random Microsoft employee on some Channel 9 video dismissing this whole thing as “ridiculous.” I don’t think Carl Franklin would bring someone on his show that is technically incompetent so surely that smug Microsoft employee has a managerial, non-technical explanation (that’s not evil) to explain why Windows applications—even the ones from Microsoft—open so many threads that sit idle. This thread idling done for “performance reasons” would mean that Windows Vista should be lightning fast—right?