Question

I have a program that involves receiving a packet from a network on one thread, then notifying other threads that the packet was received. My current approach uses Thread.Interrupt, which seems to be a bit slow when transferring huge amounts of data. Would it be faster to use “lock” to avoid using to many interrupts, or is a lock really just calling Interrupt() in its implementation?

Answer 1

I don’t understand why you would use Thread.Interrupt rather than some more traditional signalling method to notify waiting threads that data is received. Thread.Interrupt requires the target thread to be in a wait state anyway, so why not just add an object that you can signal to the target thread’s wait logic, and use that to kick it for new data?

lock is used to protect critical code or data from execution by other threads and is ill-suited as a mechanism for inter-thread active signalling.

Use WaitOne or WaitAll on suitable object(s) instead of either. System.Collections.Concurrent in .Net 4 also provides excellent means for queueing new data to a pol of target threads, and other possible approaches to your problem.