Why is Thread.Sleep so harmful

Question

I often see it mentioned that Thread.Sleep(); should not be used, but I can\'t understand why this is so. If Thread.Sleep(); can cause trouble, are

Answer 1

Sleep is used in cases where independent program(s) that you have no control over may sometimes use a commonly used resource (say, a file), that your program needs to access when it runs, and when the resource is in use by these other programs your program is blocked from using it. In this case, where you access the resource in your code, you put your access of the resource in a try-catch (to catch the exception when you can't access the resource), and you put this in a while loop. If the resource is free, the sleep never gets called. But if the resource is blocked, then you sleep for an appropriate amount of time, and attempt to access the resource again (this why you're looping). However, bear in mind that you must put some kind of limiter on the loop, so it's not a potentially infinite loop. You can set your limiting condition to be N number of attempts (this is what I usually use), or check the system clock, add a fixed amount of time to get a time limit, and quit attempting access if you hit the time limit.