How do I spawn threads on different CPU cores?

Question

Let\'s say I had a program in C# that did something computationally expensive, like encoding a list of WAV files into MP3s. Ordinarily I would encode the files one at a time

Answer 1

It is not necessarily as simple as using the thread pool.

By default, the thread pool allocates multiple threads for each CPU. Since every thread which gets involved in the work you are doing has a cost (task switching overhead, use of the CPU's very limited L1, L2 and maybe L3 cache, etc...), the optimal number of threads to use is <= the number of available CPU's - unless each thread is requesting services from other machines - such as a highly scalable web service. In some cases, particularly those which involve more hard disk reading and writing than CPU activity, you can actually be better off with 1 thread than multiple threads.

For most applications, and certainly for WAV and MP3 encoding, you should limit the number of worker threads to the number of available CPU's. Here is some C# code to find the number of CPU's:

int processors = 1;
string processorsStr = System.Environment.GetEnvironmentVariable("NUMBER_OF_PROCESSORS");
if (processorsStr != null)
    processors = int.Parse(processorsStr);

Unfortunately, it is not as simple as limiting yourself to the number of CPU's. You also have to take into account the performance of the hard disk controller(s) and disk(s).

The only way you can really find the optimal number of threads is trial an error. This is particularly true when you are using hard disks, web services and such. With hard disks, you might be better off not using all four processers on you quad processor CPU. On the other hand, with some web services, you might be better off making 10 or even 100 requests per CPU.