CODEWITHSUNDEEP
c#parallel-processing
Andrew Simpson
Andrew Simpson

Reputation: 7314

multi core processing in c#

I have a c# desktop application. Its purpose is 2 fold.

1). To display a live feed from an IP camera to my winform application. 2). Send any captured motion to my server.

It is (2) that is labour intensive. I believe I have optimised it as much as I can and the RAM is manageable.

However, in my quest to learn and to try to make my code even more efficient I am always open to new approaches.

Today, I have come across parallel processing. But, reading some links it seems to suggest there would be not much performance gain using parallel processing. Indeed in all my travels (contracts) I have never seen anyone use parallel processing in C# development.

Should I take early heed and not bother to look into this or should I see whether there is anything to gain by 'off-loading' my motion detection code to a separate parallel process?

Peoples advice/experience would be greatly informative.

Thanks

Upvotes: 0

Views: 2945

Answers (1)

Patrick Magee
Patrick Magee

Reputation: 2989

I would recommend taking a look at the Task Parallel Library provided in the .NET Framework, it's based on an idea that a piece of work is a Task. The idea is to give an abstraction to having to manage and create threads manually.

Tasks can run in parallel, on their own threads or run on the same thread, depending on the workload and configuration. Task Parallel Library is also great for asynchronous operations and work very well with I/O where the hardware can cause a blocking thread which can cause performance issues in your application, for example reading from a hard drive will cause some issues.

I suggest running a profiler on your application, visual studio professional onwards comes with a built in profiler that will enable you to trace and pin-point intensive operations that could possibly be improved with concurrency. If your application is running smooth, then there is no need, but there's nothing wrong with forward thinking and learning the Task Parallel Library as im sure there will be a point where this will benefit you from knowing how to implement concurrency in your application.

I've used TPL to solve various performance issues with large database calls in iterative loops and it's great for these IO operations, TPL will also take into account the hardware which it's being executed on and if used correctly, always be the most optimal for the hardware its running on. You could take your same piece of code and run it on a 2 core machine and it will still work the best to its abilities the hardware can provide without you having to worry about creating too many threads etc.

Personally, I'd say some asynchronous operations could be a good addition to your application since this is regarding external network camera devices which could cause blocking threads in your application.

Upvotes: 1

Related Questions