How long does thread creation and termination take under Windows?

Question

I\'ve split a complex array processing task into a number of threads to take advantage of multi-core processing and am seeing great benefits. Currently, at the start of the

Answer 1

Some advices:

1. If you have lots of work items to process (or there aren't too many, but you have to repeat the whole process time to time), make sure you use some kind of thread pooling. This way you won't have to recreate the threads all the time, and your original question won't matter any more: the threads will be created only one time. I use the QueueUserWorkItem API directly (since my application doesn't use MFC), even that one is not too painful. But in MFC you may have higher level facilities to take advantage of the thread pooling. (http://support.microsoft.com/kb/197728)
2. Try to select the optimal amount of work for one work item. Of course this depends on the feature of your software: is it supposed to be real time, or it's a number crunching in the background? If it's not real-time, then too small amount of work per work item can hurt performance: by increasing the proportion of overhead of the work distribution across threads.
3. Since hardware configurations can be very different, if your end-users can have various machines you can include some calibration routines asynchronously during the start of the software, so you can estimate how much time certain operation takes. The result of the calibration can be an input for a better work size setting later for the real calculations.