Home/ Questions/Q 8839347
In Process

The Archive Base Latest Questions

Editorial Team
  • 0
Asked: 2026-06-14T10:13:10+00:00

I’m working on a network-bound application, which is supposed to have a lot (hundreds,

  • 0

I’m working on a network-bound application, which is supposed to have a lot (hundreds, may be thousands) of parallel processes.

I’m looking for the best way to implement it.

When I tried setting

ThreadPool.SetMaxThreads(int.MaxValue, int.MaxValue);

and than creating 1000 threads and making those do stuff in parallel, application’s execution became really jumpy.

I’ve heard somewhere that delegate.BeginInvoke is somehow better that new Thread(...), so I’ve tried it, and than opened the app in debugger, and what I’ve seen are parallel threads.

If I have to create lots and lots of threads, what is the best way to ensure that the application is going to run smoothly?

Share

Leave an answer

You must login to add an answer.

Need An Account,

1 Answer

  1. Editorial Team

    Have you tried the new await / async pattern in C# 5 / .NET 4.5?

    I haven’t got sources to hand about how this operates under the hood, but one of the most common use-cases of this new feature is waiting for IO bound stuff.

    Threads are not lightweight objects. They are expensive to create and context switch to/from; hence the reason for the Thread Pool (pre-created and recycled). Most common solutions that involve networking or other IO ports utilise lower-level IO Completion Ports (there is a managed library here) to “wait” on a port, but where the thread can continue executing as normal.

    BeginInvoke will utilise a Thread Pool thread, so it will be better than creating your own only if a thread is available. This approach, if used too heavily, can immediately result in thread starvation.

    Setting such a high thread pool count is not going to work in the long run as threads are too heavy for what it appears you want to do.

    Axum, a former Microsoft Research language, used to achieve massive parallelism that would have been suitable for this task. It operated similarly to Stackless Python or Erlang. Lots of concepts from Axum made their way into the parallelism drive into C# 5 and .NET 4.5.

    • 0