A producer-consumer technique includes creating a pool of consumer threads. Producer threads can enqueue work items on a work queue. Consumer threads from the consumer pool are activated to process work items on the work queue. Only one consumer thread at time is activated from the consumer pool, the remaining consumer threads in the pool waiting for an activation event. When signaled by a producer thread, the activated consumer thread pops all the work items from the work queue for processing. The activate consumer thread then signals another consumer thread in the consumer pool by generating an activation event. When the consumer thread has processed its work items, it places itself in the consumer pool by blocking to wait for an activation event.