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Multithreading and Threadpool Basic Example

If you are performing a time consuming activity, then at that point of time your application will not respond.

To avoid this scenario it is better to use multithreading.

Multithreading is a technique that can be used to perform time consuming tasks in a separate additional thread other than the main application thread.

Now let us implement it

   •   Create a separate thread

   •   Do some process using the thread.

   •   Destroy the thread.

This approach will give unnecessarily overhead for the application. To avoid that .net introduces the concept of thread pool.

In the thread pool technique and instead of creating a new thread whenever you need one, your application will obtain a thread from the thread pool. After that obtained thread completes its task, it will be returned to the thread pool instead of destroying it - waiting for the next acquiring.

Let us implement threadpool.

Create a windows application.

Create a function that will take long time to execute

Here I am creating a function, which will create 1000 XML files and I am naming the function as CreateFiles()

public void CreateFiles(object o) {
  for (int i = 1; i < 1000; i++) {
    // Create an XMLDocument instance        
    XmlDocument doc = new System.Xml.XmlDocument();
    // Load the Xml String into XmlDocument        
    doc.LoadXml("<Root></Root>");
    // Save the document        
    doc.Save("C:\\karan\\" + i.ToString() + ".xml");
  }
  MessageBox.Show("done");
}

• Now on an event say button click call the function.

bool status = ThreadPool.QueueUserWorkItem(new WaitCallback(CreateFiles));
MessageBox.Show("karan");

When you execute the program, first MessageBox.Show("karan"); code will execute, after 1000 xml files are made MessageBox.Show("done"); execute.

Here when calling the function using threadpool class, program executes the function using another thread from the threadpool. Meanwhile code after the CreateFiles() function will execute.

Posted By -	Karan Gupta

Posted On -	Monday, August 30, 2010

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