In goofing around with some F# (via MonoDevelop), I have written a routine which lists files in a directory with one thread:

let rec loop (path:string) = 
  Array.append
    (
        path |> Directory.GetFiles
    )
    (
        path 
        |> Directory.GetDirectories
        |> Array.map loop
        |> Array.concat
    )

And then an asynchronous version of it:

let rec loopPar (path:string) = 
  Array.append
    ( 
        path |> Directory.GetFiles
    )
    ( 
        let paths = path |> Directory.GetDirectories
        if paths <> [||] then
            [| for p in paths -> async { return (loopPar p) } |]
            |> Async.Parallel
            |> Async.RunSynchronously 
            |> Array.concat
        else 
            [||]
    ) 

On small directories, the asynchronous version works fine. On bigger directories (e.g. many thousands of directories and files), the asynchronous version seems to hang. What am I missing?

I know that creating thousands of threads is never going to be the most efficient solution -- I only have 8 CPUs -- but I am baffled that for larger directories the asynchronous function just doesn't respond (even after a half hour). It doesn't visibly fail, though, which baffles me. Is there a thread pool which is exhausted?

How do these threads actually work?