diff --git a/runtime/tokio_util.rs b/runtime/tokio_util.rs
index 0d81f6e235..aa0282ece8 100644
--- a/runtime/tokio_util.rs
+++ b/runtime/tokio_util.rs
@@ -43,7 +43,15 @@ pub fn create_basic_runtime() -> tokio::runtime::Runtime {
     // parallel for deno fmt.
     // The default value is 512, which is an unhelpfully large thread pool. We
     // don't ever want to have more than a couple dozen threads.
-    .max_blocking_threads(32)
+    .max_blocking_threads(if cfg!(windows) {
+      // on windows, tokio uses blocking tasks for child process IO, make sure
+      // we have enough available threads for other tasks to run
+      4 * std::thread::available_parallelism()
+        .map(|n| n.get())
+        .unwrap_or(8)
+    } else {
+      32
+    })
     .build()
     .unwrap()
 }