BackgroundWorker 中的 Thread.Sleep(0)

Question

Is there a harm in using Thread.Sleep(0) in a BackgroundWorker thread? Is there a benefit?

I use BackgroundWorker for things like lengthy database queries, datatable builds, https web queries, etc. These tasks sometimes take up to five seconds to complete. I thought I observed BackgroundWorker making the UI slightly less responsive, but I may be mistaken. So, I placed Thread.Sleep(0) in the BackgroundWorker code. Did that actually help me? Did it hurt me?

EDIT: I am trying to make the UI thread more responsive. I believed that Sleep(0) would yield time to the UI thread during tight loops, and make the UI more responsive, but maybe I'm wrong. I don't care how long the background task takes.

Answer 1

A benefit? No, it is just a stab for a stop on 0 milliseconds . Maybe, it is useful to dynamically change the delay. But I don't know a useful case for it.

Harm? Not big, just a few OS instructions to make the stop and keep it on. No result but some additional work.

BackgroundWorker by its definition is for heavy/long tasks that shouldn't block UI (block elements, fill your form with a single color, ...). That

slightly less responsive

behavior comes from the heavy task in the background. Your machine still has the same OS/RAM/CPU that should be shared between all of your threads and tasks. If your machine is out of free resources then existing ones will be shared in time. Kind of an additional big player that pushes existing ones.

Update. As properly noticed Solomon Slow , Sleep(0) is an equivalent for Yeld() (pass execution to another thread that is ready to run on the current processor). So it COULD slow your BG process, make it work longer.