Reading from a pipe: -stdinReferenceUsing a proxy: -proxy and -noproxyControlling concurrency: -maxthreads

Controlling concurrency: -maxthreads

Big Brother is a multi-threaded program. This means that it can conduct several tasks in parallel. This allows it to gain a lot of time, because while it is waiting for a remote server to answer a request, it can still work on other tasks.

There is a limit to the number of tasks (called threads) that can be run concurrently. (If there wasn't, Big Brother would eagerly try to do hundreds of things at once and might use up all of your machine's resources.) By default, this limit is 16, as if you had typed

-maxthreads 16

which means that Big Brother will check up to 16 links simultaneously. You can experiment. Big Brother should use less processing power and memory if the limit is decreased, and it should be faster if the limit is increased.
François Pottier, May 5, 2004

Reading from a pipe: -stdinReferenceUsing a proxy: -proxy and -noproxyControlling concurrency: -maxthreads