Thread Pool vs Many Individual Threads
===

I'm in the middle of a problem where I am unable decide which solution to take.

The problem is a bit unique. Lets put it this way, i am receiving data from the network continuously (2 to 4 times per second). Now each data belongs to a different, lets say, group.
Now, lets call these groups, group1, group2 and so on.

Each group has a dedicated job queue where data from the network is filtered and added to its corresponding group for processing.

At first I created a dedicated thread per group which would take data from the job queue, process it and then goes to blocking state (using Linked Blocking Queue).

But my senior suggested that i should use thread pools because this way threads wont get blocked and will be usable by other groups for processing.

But here is the thing, the data im getting is fast enough and the time a thread takes to process it is long enough for the thread to, possibly, not go into blocking mode. And this will also guarantee that data gets processed sequentially (job 1 gets done before job 2), which in pooling, very little chances are, might not happen.

My senior is also bent on the fact that pooling will also save us lots of memory because threads are POOLED (im thinking he really went for the word ;) ). While i dont agree to this because, i personally think, pooled or not each thread gets its own stack memory. Unless there is something in thread pools which i am not aware of.

One last thing, I always thought that pooling helps where jobs appear in a big number for short time. This makes sense because thread spawning would be a performance kill because of the time taken to init a thread is lot more than time spent on doing the job. So pooling helps a lot here.

But in my case group1, group2,...,groupN always remain alive. So if there is data or not they will still be there. So thread spawning is not the issue here.

My senior is not convinced and wants me to go with the pooling solution because its memory footprint is great.

So, which path to take?

Thank you.