Proper way to have an endless worker thread?

Question

I have an object that requires a lot of initialization (1-2 seconds on a beefy machine). Though once it is initialized it only takes about 20 miliseconds to do a typical \"job\"

Answer 1

You need to lock anyway, so you can Wait and Pulse:

while(true) {
    SomeType item;
    lock(queue) {
        while(queue.Count == 0) {
            Monitor.Wait(queue); // releases lock, waits for a Pulse,
                                 // and re-acquires the lock
        }
        item = queue.Dequeue(); // we have the lock, and there's data
    }
    // process item **outside** of the lock
}

with add like:

lock(queue) {
    queue.Enqueue(item);
    // if the queue was empty, the worker may be waiting - wake it up
    if(queue.Count == 1) { Monitor.PulseAll(queue); }
}

You might also want to look at this question, which limits the size of the queue (blocking if it is too full).