Question

I am trying to use the parallel task library to kick off a number of tasks like this:

var workTasks = _schedules.Where(x => x.Task.Enabled);   
_tasks = new Task[workTasks.Count()];    
_cancellationTokenSource = new CancellationTokenSource();       
_cancellationTokenSource.Token.ThrowIfCancellationRequested();    

int i = 0;    
foreach (var schedule in _schedules.Where(x => x.Task.Enabled))
{
    _log.InfoFormat("Reading task information for task {0}", schedule.Task.Name);    
    if(!schedule.Task.Enabled)
    {
        _log.InfoFormat("task {0} disabled.", schedule.Task.Name);    
        i++;    
        continue;   
    }

    schedule.Task.ServiceStarted = true;    
    _tasks[i] = Task.Factory.StartNew(() =>
            schedule.Task.Run()
        , _cancellationTokenSource.Token);                        
    i++;    
    _log.InfoFormat("task {0} has been added to the worker threads and has been started.", schedule.Task.Name);
}

I want these tasks to sleep and then wake up every 5 minutes and do their stuff, at the moment I am using Thread.Sleep in the Schedule object whose Run method is the Action that is passed into StartNew as an argument like this:

_tasks[i] = Task.Factory.StartNew(() =>
        schedule.Task.Run()
    , _cancellationTokenSource.Token);

I read somewhere that Thread.Sleep is a bad solution for this. Can anyone recommend a better approach?

Answer 1

Bad solution are Tasks here. Task should be used for short living operations, like asynch IO. If you want to control life time of task you should use Thread and sleep as much as you like, because Thread is individual, but Tasks are rotated in thread pool which is shared.