It's generally considered the right move to just spawn your own thread for things like connections instead of pooling threads - people tend to think they should throw everything into a threadpool but it's not actually encouraged to do that for stuff like web server connections, compiles, etc unless the task is short-lived. I wish more people knew that going in :) Some threadpool APIs actually ask you whether the job is going to take a while and if it is, they function more as a job limiter - not 500 active threads all competing for CPU - than a thread reuser.