Thread pools in Java

I have often used thread pools in my applications. My favourite opensource thread pool was the PooledExecutor class written by Doug Lea (available here )

But it's also important to understand when to use thread pools and when not to use. I recently came across a good article on the web - http://www-128.ibm.com/developerworks/java/library/j-jtp0730.html

In this article the author argues that using thread pools makes sense whenever U have a large number of tasks that need to be processed and each task is short-lived. For e.g. Webservers, FTP servers etc.
But when the tasks are long running and few in number it may make sense to actually spawn a thread for each task. Another common threading model is to have a single background thread and task queue for tasks of a certain type. AWT and Swing use this model, in which there is a GUI event thread, and all work that causes changes in the user interface must execute in that thread.

Java 5.0 has come up with a new package java.util.concurrent that contains a lot of cool classes if U need to implement threading in Ur applications.