Alternatives to Thread.Sleep()

Question

Every N minutes we want to run through a list of tasks. So we\'ve created a task executor with a

do { DoWork(); }while(!stopRequested)

No

Answer 1

If all your thread is doing is something like:

while (!stop_working)
{
    DoWork();
    Thread.Sleep(FiveMinutes);
}

Then I would suggest not using a thread at all. First, there's no particularly good reason to incur the system overhead of a dedicated thread that spends most of its time sleeping. Secondly, if you set the stop_working flag 30 seconds after the thread stops sleeping, you'll have to wait four and a half minutes before the thread wakes up and terminates.

I'd suggest as others have: use a timer:

System.Threading.Timer WorkTimer;

// Somewhere in your initialization:

WorkTimer = new System.Threading.Timer((state) =>
    {
        DoWork();
    }, null, TimeSpan.FromMinutes(5.0), TimeSpan.FromMinutes(5.0));

And to shut down:

 WorkTimer.Dispose();