TDM Rerun #16: Thread Pooling, The Practical Way

As we found out, the system thread pool in Windows 2000 (plus XP and 2003) is woefully inadequate for any serious use. It seems that its designer was only thinking about really trivial usage and expected everyone else to create their own thread pool. Luckily, it was possible to create a fully-fledged pooling layer based on the system thread pool and the application was saved.
- Thread Pooling, The Practial Way, The Delphi Magazine 112, December 2004

The December 2004 issue describes one of my first serious forays into the muddy waters of parallel processing. The article describes a work item pooling mechanism built in Windows (QueueUserWorkItem) and a management wrapper that I built around this API to make its use bearable.
The GpWinThreadPool unit (described in this article) has been later replaced with a TThread-based pool of my own design and that unit (GpThreadPool) was superseded by the thread pool built in the OmniThreadLibrary. The use of the code described in this TDM article is not really recommended (except maybe for the educational purposes).
Links: article (PDF, 116 KB), source code (ZIP, 2,6 MB).

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