Starting a goroutine takes 1-2µs on my laptop. From the "numbers every
Go programmer should know", I had 300ns for a channel send in my
mind. Turns out, on my laptop, it takes only 60ns. That's fast enough
to warrant the machinery of yet another channel with a fixed set of
worker goroutines feeding from it. The number chosen (8 for now) is
low enough to not really afflict a measurable overhead (a big
Prometheus server has >1000 goroutines running), but high enough to
not make sample ingestion a bottleneck.