Multithreading also comes with disadvantages. The biggest is that it can lead to vastly more complex programs. Having multiple threads does not in itself create complexity; it's the interaction between the threads that creates complexity. This applies whether or not the interaction is intentional, and can result long development cycles, as well as an ongoing susceptibility to intermittent and non-reproducable bugs. For this reason, it pays to keep such interaction in a multi-threaded design simple – or not use multithreading at all – unless you have a peculiar penchant for re-writing and debugging!

Multithreading also comes with a resource and CPU cost in allocating and switching threads if used excessively. In particular, when heavy disk I/O is involved, it can be faster to have just one or two workers thread performing tasks in sequence, rather than having a multitude of threads each executing a task at the same time. Later we describe how to implement a Producer/Consumer queue, which provides just this functionality.