title: Symptoms of thread leak
body: <p>I have a C++ application that isn't calling <code>pthread_join</code> and has O(time running) threads.  My question is - how would this affect the health of the server task?  Is there a fixed number of threads a C++ task can hold before it crashes or fails to start new threads?  Will this manifest as an error code in <code>pthread_create</code>?  Does it just leak memory or will it slow down processing time of the rest of the applications?</p>
  
  <p>The threads are finishing (top level function is returning), just not being <code>pthread_join</code>'ed.</p>