Is there any possible way to achieve this?
For instance, I have an I/O completion port that 10 worker threads are pulling tasks out of. Each task is associated with an object. Some objects cannot be worked on concurrently, so if one thread is working with one of these objects and a second thread pulls out a task that requires this object, the second thread has to wait for the first to complete.
As a work around, objects could have an event that gets signaled upon release. If a thread is ‘stuck’ because the task is received requires a locked object, it could wait on either the locked object to be released, or for a new task to be queued. If it picks up a new task, it will push the task it couldn’t work on back into the queue.
I am aware of alternative approaches, but this seems like functionality that should exist. Can this be achieved with Windows API?
The idea solution is to have a thread wait for the event and post to the completion port when the event occurs. Alternatively, have a thread wait for the event and just handle it. If you have two fundamentally different things you need to do, use two threads to do them.