CPU friendly infinite loop

Question

Writing an infinite loop is simple:

while(true){
    //add whatever break condition here
}

But this will trash the CPU performance. This ex

Answer 1

It sounds to me like you want Main() to enter an interruptable loop. For this to happen, multiple threads must be involved somewhere (or your loop must poll periodically; I am not discussing that solution here though). Either another thread in the same application, or a thread in another process, must be able to signal to your Main() loop that it should terminate.

If this is true, then I think you want to use a ManualResetEvent or an EventWaitHandle . You can wait on that event until it is signalled (and the signalling would have to be done by another thread).

For example:

using System;
using System.Threading;
using System.Threading.Tasks;

namespace Demo
{
    class Program
    {
        static void Main(string[] args)
        {
            startThreadThatSignalsTerminatorAfterSomeTime();
            Console.WriteLine("Waiting for terminator to be signalled.");
            waitForTerminatorToBeSignalled();
            Console.WriteLine("Finished waiting.");
            Console.ReadLine();
        }

        private static void waitForTerminatorToBeSignalled()
        {
            _terminator.WaitOne(); // Waits forever, but you can specify a timeout if needed.
        }

        private static void startThreadThatSignalsTerminatorAfterSomeTime()
        {
            // Instead of this thread signalling the event, a thread in a completely
            // different process could do so.

            Task.Factory.StartNew(() =>
            {
                Thread.Sleep(5000);
                _terminator.Set();
            });
        }

        // I'm using an EventWaitHandle rather than a ManualResetEvent because that can be named and therefore
        // used by threads in a different process. For intra-process use you can use a ManualResetEvent, which 
        // uses slightly fewer resources and so may be a better choice.

        static readonly EventWaitHandle _terminator = new EventWaitHandle(false, EventResetMode.ManualReset, "MyEventName");
    }
}