So I have built a small application that has a physics engine and a display. The display is attached to a controller which handles the physics engine(well, actually a view model that handles the controller, but details).
Currently the controller is a delegate that gets activated by a begin-invoke and deactivated by a cancellation token, and then reaped by an endinvoke. Inside the lambda brushes PropertyChanged(hooked into INotifyPropertyChanged) which keeps the UI up to date.
From what I understand the BeginInvoke method activates a task rather than another thread(which on my computers does activate another thread, but this isn’t a guarantee from the reading I have done,it’s up to the thread pool how it wants to get the task completed), which is fine from all the testing I have done. The lambda doesn’t complete until a CancellationToken is killed. It has a sleep and an update(so it is sort of simulating a real-time physics engine…it’s crude, but I don’t need real precision on the real time, just enough to get a feel)
The question I have is, will this work on other computers, or should I switch over to explicit threads that I start and cancel? The scenario I am thinking of is on a 1 core processor, is it possible the second task will get massively less processor time and thereby make my acceptably inaccurate model into something unacceptably inaccurate(i.e. waiting for milliseconds before switching rather than microseconds?). Or is their some better way of doing this that I haven’t come up with?
In my experience, using the threadpool in the way you described will pretty much guarantee reasonably optimal performance on most computers, without you having to go to the trouble to figure out how to divvy up the threads.
A thread is not the same thing as a core; you will still get multiple threads on a single-core machine, and those threads will each take part of the processing load. You won’t get the “deadlock” condition you describe, unless you do something unusual with the threads, like give one of them real-time priority.
That said, microseconds is not a lot of time for context switching between threads, so YMMV. You’ll have to try it, and see how well it works; there may be some tweaking required.