Is “while (true)” usually used for a permanent thread?

Question

I\'m relatively new to coding; most of my \"work\" has been just simple GUI apps that only function for one thing, so I haven\'t had to thread much.

Anyway, one thing I\

Answer 1

Ideally you want the thread to be "runnable" when it has work to do, and "sleeping" when there is nothing to do.

This is best done with objects like mutual exclusions (mutexes), semaphores and condition variables, which provide mechanisms for threads to wake other threads up when there may be something for them to do.

Just doing a timed sleep is inefficient, because a short sleep means the thread wastes time waking up to check if there's work to do, while a long sleep means the thread might be asleep while there's work to be done. Usually this is not a big deal but if the code deals with large volumes of requests or data things don't go so well.

A basic model works like this: Thread A puts objects in a queue. Thread B removes an object from the queue, performs an action, and repeats. If there are no objects in the queue, thread B will remain asleep until an object arrives.

You must also be careful that threads which access shared stuff avoid race conditions.

I can't give any C#-specific insight, but I know that C# gives you some tools to help you out.