> One thing to think about with
> this example is the proper priority of I/O handling generally.  What
> if, instead of a file, this example code was writing on a pipe to
> another process?   For that, you would probably want that I/O thread
> to be able to blast its data to the receiver as fast as it reasonably
> can so that it can be done with it and get back to other work. 

We should be careful with statements such as "you want probably want
[...]". There may be situations where you want such a thing; others
where you don't really want (or care about) it.

While IO responsiveness and throughput can be an important measure of
performance, it is not the only one and depending on the situation it
actually may not matter at all.