How to trigger a background thread when my queue has something to process

Question

I am using ConcurrentQueue to store messages from multiple threads.

How to create some background thread which will automatically get triggered when my queue has something in it?

Answer 1

You might start a worker thread with a Thread.Sleep() in it and after sleep ask if your queue has count > 0.

You might put the thread initializing code in the constructor of your class or an initializer method.

    ...
    var queue = new ConcurrentQueue<T>(); //Use your generic type for T
    var thread = new Thread(() => WorkOnQueue(queue));

    thread.IsBackground = true;
    thread.Name = "My Worker Thread";
    thread.Start();
    ...


    private void WorkOnQueue(ConcurrentQueue queue)
    {   
        var pause = TimeSpan.FromSeconds(0.05);
        while (!abort) // some criteria to abort or even true works here
        {
            if (queue.Count == 0)
            {
                // no pending actions available. pause
                Thread.Sleep(pause);
                continue;
            }

            DoWork(); //Contains the TryDequeue ...
        }
    }