An embodiment of the invention provides a method for adaptive auto-pipelining of a stream processing application, wherein the stream processing application includes one or more threads. Runtime of the stream processing application is initiated with a stream processing application manager. The stream processing application is monitored with a monitoring module during the runtime, wherein the monitoring of the stream processing application includes identifying threads in the stream processing application that execute operators in a data flow graph, and determining an amount of work that each of the threads are performing on operators of the logical data flow graph. A processor identifies one or more operators in the data flow graph to add one or more additional threads based on the monitoring of the stream processing application during the runtime.