Executing method in intervals – good and bad approaches
In last few days I’ve seen couple of pieces of code with “executing method every x seconds”. And a lot of bad. Not buggy, but superfluously expensive. I’m also here adding a simple loop to run just 10 times.
The first bad one is simply using Thread and Sleep method.
void BadOne1()
{
Thread t = new Thread(o =>
{
for (int i = 0; i < 10; i++)
{
Console.WriteLine("BadOne1");
Thread.Sleep(1000);
}
});
t.Start(null);
}
Problem is the Thread object is very expensive and it’s used only fraction of time. The rest is blocked. Simply wasted resources.
I’ve also seen slightly better version.
void BadOne2()
{
ThreadPool.QueueUserWorkItem(o =>
{
for (int i = 0; i < 10; i++)
{
Console.WriteLine("BadOne2");
Thread.Sleep(1000);
}
});
}
This is really just a little bit better. ThreadPool thread is used, but again, the thread is doing nothing a lot of time. Again wasted resources.
Better approach is to use Timer. This way you’re not wasting resources by abusing threads. The callback from Timer is executed when the interval is elapsed (on ThreadPool thread). Rest of the time it’s just sits there waiting for next tick.
void GoodOne1()
{
int i = 0;
Timer t = null;
t = new Timer(o =>
{
Console.WriteLine("GoodOne1");
if (Interlocked.Increment(ref i) == 10)
{
// could tick, still
t.Change(Timeout.InfiniteTimeSpan, Timeout.InfiniteTimeSpan);
t.Dispose(); // or somewhere else
}
}, null, TimeSpan.Zero, TimeSpan.FromSeconds(1));
}
Here I’d like to point to my older post about keeping the reference to Timer.
And also one question that might come. The Timer ticks every interval no matter how long executing the callback took. That might not be what you want. You may want to execute the method with xx seconds delay between (previous examples), not execute the method every xx second (this example). The solution is pretty easy. Initially just schedule one tick and then reschedule it for next interval.
void GoodOne2()
{
int i = 0;
Timer t = null;
t = new Timer(o =>
{
Console.WriteLine("GoodOne2");
if (Interlocked.Increment(ref i) == 10)
{
// could tick, still
t.Change(Timeout.InfiniteTimeSpan, Timeout.InfiniteTimeSpan);
t.Dispose(); // or somewhere else
}
else
{
t.Change(TimeSpan.FromSeconds(1), Timeout.InfiniteTimeSpan);
}
}, null, TimeSpan.Zero, Timeout.InfiniteTimeSpan);
}
All these are kinda low level. But you can use Reactive Extensions (Rx) to write it in more succinct way, but internally the core idea is same as with Timer.
void GoodOne3()
{
IDisposable obs = null;
obs = Observable
.Timer(TimeSpan.Zero, TimeSpan.FromSeconds(1))
.Take(10)
.Subscribe(_ =>
{
Console.WriteLine("GoodOne3");
}, () => obs.Dispose() /* or somewhere else */);
}
No matter what approach you’ll use, please don’t (ab)use threads (manually created or ThreadPool ones). Threads are small little nice sweet creatures that don’t deserve to be treated like this. And. Don’t forget to cleanup resources (i.e. Timer is IDisposable).
