Question

In Cocoa, is NSThread faster than pthread? is are any performance gain? is it negligible to ignore?

Answer 1

I have no data to back this up, but I’m going to go out on a limb and say “they’re equivalent”. NSThread is almost certainly wrapper around pthread (is there really any other way to create a system thread?), so any overhead of using NSThread versus pthread would be that associated with creating a new object and then destroying it. Once the thread itself starts, it should be pretty much identical in terms of performance.

I think the real question here is: “Why do you need to know?” Have you come up against some situation where spawning NSThreads seems to be detrimental to your performance? (I could see this being an issue if you’re spawning hundreds of threads, but in that case, the hundreds of threads are most likely your problem, and not the NSThread objects)

Unless you have proof that the creation of an NSThread object is a bottleneck in your application, I would definitely go with the “negligible to ignore” option.