CPU efficiant thread when polling for updates.

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  13 years ago

  by richard.norris

  Richard

  Bournemouth, England, United Kingdom

  Joined 15 years ago

  Hi all,

  I have a problem I'm not sure how to solve.

  I have an application that will spawn multiple worker threads (non thread-pool) that needs to know when jobs are added to a queue in SQL server 2005.  Now the neat solution would be to use AutoResetEvents when the data is updated.  The problem is the data is updated from a completely different application (out of process code).

  If I use a polling mechanism things are going to get hairy.  I cannot have several threads polling the DB at the same time I guess it will just kill the DB.  What can I do here?  Anyone have any advice?  Would I need to have one thread polling the DB and signalling the threads that want to know?  Problem is that gets complicated.  Can I somehow signal the threads from an outside process.  Problem is the code is not .NET so COM interop is the only way (ah, nightmare)

  Is there any other way I can do this kind of polling in a CPU friendly way?  Is there a wait mechanism available that I have missed?

  TIA

  Richard

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