Feedback from threads to main program

Question

My software will simulate a few hundred hardware devices, each of which will send several thousand reports to a database server.

Trying it without threading did not give

Answer 1

One way to organize this is for your threads to add messages to a thread-safe queue (e.g. a ConcurrentQueue) as they get data. To keep things simple you can have a timer thread in your UI that periodically dequeues the queued messages to a private list and then renders them. This design allows your threads to easily queue and forget messages with minimal contention, and for your UI to periodically update itself without blocking your writers too much (i.e. for only the period it takes to dequeue current messages to a private list).

Although you are attempting to simulate the load of hundreds of devices, using thread per device is not the way to model this as you can only run so many threads concurrently anyway.