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

This reminds me of the old airline ticketing systems, where you had queues. Ticketing requests were put in different queues depending on what kind of attention they needed.

So maybe you could have the queue of objects requiring frequent attention, and the queue of objects requiring infrequent attention. When necessary, you move them from one to the other.

You could have a timer for the frequent queue, and a timer for the infrequent queue. For the frequent queue, you could split it into multiple queues, one for each thread.

For crunching the frequent queue(s), you should not have more threads than you have cores. If you have two cores, what you want to do is get both of them cranking. Any more threads than that will not make things any faster. In fact, if processing the objects requires disk I/O or getting in line for some other shared hardware, it may not even help to get both cores running.