What method should be used to perform one task multiple times in parallel?

Question

Im have this simple task

void DoWork(string job)

That shoud bu performed many times in parrallel on Azure Worker Role . I have these options:

• multi Asynchronous calls to DoWork

   while(true) {DoWorkDelegate.BeginInvoke(...);} 

• Allocate by myself many threds

   while(true) {Thread t = new Thread( DoWork); t.Start();} 

• Thread Pool

In terms of utilizations what is the recommanded method?

Answer 1

It is possible that this example is over simplified. In the examples shows a new thread would be spun up for each iteration in the loop. While I completely agree with @DanielMann to use TPL instead of threads, adding

while (true) {
  Task.Factory.StartNew(() => DoWork());
}

would still spin up a lot of threads. Make sure there is a test for work to do outside of spinning up the threads like

while (true) {
  job = FetchJobFromQueue();
  if( job != null ){
    Task.Factory.StartNew(() => DoWork(job));
  }
  else {
    Thread.Sleep(1000);
  }
}

Note the sleep time to keep from pegging the processor on an empty loop.

On a somewhat related note, take a look at this MSDN article for proper handling of that while(true) loop for exit conditions.