Timer Efficiency

Question

I am planning to develop a system with tens of thousands of objects in it, which will each have up to 42(but more likely down around 4 or 5) separate actions they will potential

Answer 1

None of the above. The standard solution is to keep a list of events, such that each one points to the next one to occur. You then use a single timer and have it wake up only in time for the next event.

edit

Looks like this is called a timer wheel.

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As Sentinel pointed out, events should be dispatched to a thread pool. The handler for these events should do a small bit of work as quickly as possible, and without blocking. If it needs to do I/O, it should fire off an async task and terminate. Otherwise, a thread pool would overflow.

The .NET 4.0 Task class might be helpful here, particularly for its continuation methods.