如何在多线程应用程序中衡量负载平衡

Question

I'm writing a multithreaded C#/.Net application to control an industrial process. There are many compute-intensive tasks that need to be performed and many of them could be done in parallel with very little contention for shared objects. So this is a good opportunity to spawn multiple threads to improve performance.

How do I measure/monitor/test thread load performance to ensure that I'm balancing the work optimally among all the threads I create, so all the threads are fully utilizing the maximum time-slice they get from the scheduler and they don't spend much time stopped or waiting?

FWIW I'm using VS2010 Professional edition

Answer 1

You can measure CPU usage by using PerformanceCounter class.

If your load is well balanced across multiples CPU cores, then your global CPU should run at 100%, if there is no bottleneck (disk or network access for example). If some thread waits for resources, or is blocked, you should notice it at the CPU usage level.

But just using taskmgr.exe is really easier during debugging process.

If you want a fine grained analysis of the Thread waits, you can hook on the ThreadPool by registering a WaitOrTimerCallback to be notified when a Thread times out. But keep in mind it's normal for a thread to wait sometimes, what you want is to maximize CPU usage, not minimize Thread waits (Yes, at worst case, you can saturate a CPU with thread operations, but if you stick with the same number of thread than logical CPU cores, it'll be fine)