[jasontedor]

I think that the full context of the sentence you quoted will help:

> In this case, if you base your number of threads off grepping lscpu you take another dependency (on the util-linux package), which isn’t needed. You also get the wrong answer, as you do by grepping /proc/cpuinfo. So, what this will end up doing is just increase the number of context switches, possibly also adding a performance degradation.

The idea is that a common way to size an application that exploits concurrency is to base the number of application threads on the hardware threads available. This portion of the article is saying that if you do so on the basis of `lscpu` or grepping `/proc/cpuinfo` you could mis-size relative to the actual number of cores available to schedule the threads of your application on. Doing so will lead to excessive context switching for your application, and that can hurt.