Is putting thread on hold optimal?

Question

Application has an auxiliary thread. This thread is not meant to run all the time, but main process can call it very often.

So, my question is, what is more optimal

Answer 1

Another option would be the TMonitor introduced in Delphi 2009, which has functions like Wait, Pulse and PulseAll to keep threads inactive when there is nothing to do for them, and notify them as soon as they should continue with their work. It is loosely modeled after the object locks in Java. Like there, Delphi object now have a "lock" field which can be used for thread synchrinozation.

A blog which gives an example for a threaded queue class can be found at http://delphihaven.wordpress.com/2011/05/04/using-tmonitor-1/

Unfortunately there was a bug in the TMonitor implementation, which seems to be fixed in XE2