apache/spark — pull request #3469 by aarondav (2014-11-26 04:41:32+00:00)
Title: [SPARK-4516] Cap default number of Netty threads at 8

In practice, only 2-4 cores should be required to transfer roughly 10 Gb/s, and each core that we use will have an initial overhead of roughly 32 MB of off-heap memory, which comes at a premium.

Thus, this value should still retain maximum throughput and reduce wasted off-heap memory allocation. It can be overridden by setting the number of serverThreads and clientThreads manually in Spark's configuration.