Using I/O Completion Port (IOCP) to implement our own thread pool at 12:55 PM

Here I talk about another old but important technology for .NET server application.

Before we discuss thread pool, a concept should be clear: You can generate as many threads as you want in .NET code, but the default thread pool has at most 25 threads.

For a server application, it is normally necessary to use thread pool to leverage client requests, even on a single CPU computer.

1. Thread pool background knowledge

Creating thread is expensive: To create a thread, a kernel object is allocated and initialized, the thread's stack memory is allocated and initialized, and Windows sends every DLL in the process a DLL_THREAD_ATTACH notification, causing pages from disk to be faulted into memory so that code can execute. When a thread dies, every DLL is sent a DLL_THREAD_DETACH notification, the thread's stack memory is freed, and the kernel object is freed (if its usage count goes to 0).

Thread pool keeps some idle threads in suspended state to save time. At first, there is no thread in the thread pool. When the first request comes, a thread is created to process the request. If the request process takes long time (such as accessing web service), the thread enters sleeping mode at a certain time, the thread pool can create another thread to serve queued requests. When web service response comes back, the sleeping thread is woken up to continue the process. After the request is processed, the thread does not simply die, but serves other requests.

If we do not use thread pool, we will end up using one single thread to serve all client requests sequentially (for long-running request, the performance is terrible); or we create/destroy a thread for each client request, which is time consuming for large amount of requests.

2. Why do we need our own thread pool

By default, there are 25 threads in the thread pool for a .NET application. Normally, the .NET thread pool is OK if there are not many services running in the application and each request process is short. But if the application have many tasks to do (with several back ground threads, scheduler, many long-running requests), it is necessary to build our own thread pool.

3. How to build thread pool

Windows Server I/O Completion Port (IOCP) is a kernel queue that can be used for thread pool. The basic idea is to allocate a number of threads to wait on the queue. A request on the queue includes request data address that is supposed to indicate delegate value, so that the thread can run the delegated method.

You can read more about IOCP thread pool implementation in C# from Part I and Part II

The problem of the article is that the author did not show how to get the request data. You should use Target property of GCHandle to get the real .NET data back.