How can I make my thread sleep first before it runs? I know how to get sleep to work, however, whenever my program is run, the thread immediately runs. I want it to WAIT once it is first created to start running. (I am using handlers)
You cannot control when threads are scheduled. If you want it to go to sleep, have the first statement in the thread subroutine do a wait on a condition or something like that and when you are ready you can broadcast to that condition. In pseudo-code:
get-lock
if (we-are-still-supposed-to-sleep)
pthread_cond_wait()
release-lock
I suppose you could have the parent hold the lock while creating the children and then all they have to do is:
get-lock
release-lock
and avoid the condition thing.
What OS? Windoze allows you to create threads in a suspended state. When you have loaded up the thread fields in the ctor, you can resume the thread. Failing that, pass some synchro object in the thread start parameter for the new thread to wait on.
Rgds,
Martin.
Related
I'm new to threading, so there are a few things I'm trying to grasp correctly.
I have a windows form application that uses threading to keep my UI responsive while some server shenanigans are going on.
My question is: when I quit my application, what happens to ongoing threads? Will they run to completion or will the abruptly be interrupted?
If they are interrupted, what can I do to make sure they at least don't get interrupted in such a way that would corrupt data on my server (force them to run to a safe place in the code where I know it's ok to interrupt the execution)
You will want to keep a reference of said threads, and call .Abort() on them when you want to terminate. Then you put your thread's code in a try/catch block and handle ThreadAbortException's. This will let you clean up what you are doing and terminate the thread cleanly at your own pace. In the main thread, after you called .Abort(), you just wait until the thread is no longer running (by polling the .IsAlive property of the Thread object) and close your application afterwards.
A thread needs a process to run in. The process won't be able to terminate if you don't terminate all the non-background threads you have started. Threads marked as background thread will be aborted.
So, the behavior is entirely up to your implementation. If you want to close the application, you could wait for all threads to terminate by themself, you could set an event to ask them to terminate and wait or you could just kill the threads.
The UI thread will terminate by itself because it runs a messageloop that stops when requested by the operating system, also see wikipedia and this answer.
I know how waitpid(-1...) allows me to wait until all children have finished, such as waitpid(-1, &status). But how can I wait until all background processes are finished? Someone suggested that I can use the same waitpid (in a loop?) to achieve this but I don't see how.
To be clear, I'm implementing a shell, and need to add a new built-in command wait, which waits until all background jobs have terminated before returning to the prompt.
I read somewhere else on SO that "You will also want to call waitpid() with the WNOHANG option regularly - say, immediately before you display the shell prompt. This will allow you to detect when the background process has exited or stopped " But again, child != background. So even that I don't believe.
Edit:
I ended up just doing while(wait(NULL) > 0); and that's it, it worked. But what I'm still confused about is don't I WANT to make a distinction between foreground and background because the wait I'm implementing only waits for the background processes, and all children are equal in the eye of wait() or waitpid().
So again, the children I'm waiting for by using wait() or waitpid() aren't necessarily background processes. Am I wrong?
Since you ask in the context of implementing a shell, and evidently your shell supports enough job control to have a concept of background processes, it is reasonable to suppose that your implementation will have a table in which it tracks background jobs. That table can and should track the PID of the process associated with each job.
Having those PIDs in hand, you can waitpid() for specific background jobs until there are no more in the table, or you can waitpid(-1) to collect
any and every job, in a loop, until there are no more background jobs in the table.
If you want to implement background process (and job control) and catch their termination (at least) you must set a signal handler for SIGCHLD, and call wait(-1) inside it. This will let your shell receive asynchronous notifications of background processes termination. You may have a look at Catching SIGCHLD for example and discussion about this.
I have the following sub in my program:
public sub RunThis()
Me.Hide()
NEWFORM.Show()
Dim t = New Thread(Sub() Me.printToPowerPoint(saveLocation, printlist))
t.SetApartmentState(ApartmentState.STA)
t.IsBackground = True
t.Start()
While t.isAlive
end while
NEWFORM.close()
Me.Close()
end sub
Running this my program hangs. Does anyone have a solution for this problem.
I am new to threading.
As you probably know, in WinForm projects, the UI can only be dealt with from a single thread. This is affectionately known as the UI thread. That's why, any time you need to access or modify a UI element, you must call the control or form's Invoke method. The Invoke method causes the given delegate to be run on the UI thread. However, doing so will not interrupt any processing that is already being performed by the UI thread. If the UI thread is currently busy, when you call Invoke, it will hang until the UI thread is no longer busy, then it will execute the given delegate.
So, in your code, you are starting a new thread which inside it is trying to invoke a method back on the UI thread. However, immediately after starting the new thread, you then enter a loop which keeps the UI thread busy until the other thread is done. So, when your new thread invokes back to the UI thread, the UI thread is busy and both threads are effectively hung forever.
DoEvents is a keyword you can call from within a lengthy process or loop in the UI thread to signal that you want to, essentially, pause your current processing thereby freeing up the UI thread to process any waiting window messages (painting events, click events, invoke requests, etc.). As soon as all those pending window messages are processed, it will return to doing whatever the next statement is after you called DoEvents. Therefore, if calling DoEvents inside the loop causes it to work properly, that means that your new thread must be invoking back onto the UI thread, or waiting for some other window message to be processed before continuing.
Calling DoEvents is dangerous and widely panned as being bad practice. Typically, if you need to call DoEvents, it's a sign that you need to rethink your design. Usually there is a better way to do what you are doing.
In your case, it looks like starting the new thread is utterly pointless. Unless you have abbreviated you code, it appears that as soon as you start the new thread, you simply put the UI thread on hold waiting for the other thread to finish. If that's the case, it would make much more sense to simply do the work on the UI thread itself rather than starting a new one. In the code you provided, no two threads will ever be effectively be doing processing at the same time, so it's no better than a single thread.
I am trying to use a separate thread to handle specific events in VB.Net. The idea being that I do not want the main application to be held up if a particular event handler takes awhile to finish. How do I get my main thread loop to suspend the thread while allowing it to handle events when they occur?
When I create a Windows Forms application, there is a UI thread that handles the UI events. I do not imagine that this thread is continuously polling some variable to see if someone has pressed a button. I imagine the thread is suspended until the OS tells it there is something to do. I was trying to figure out how to ensure that my event handlers were not being executed by the UI thread. From what I have read, I can do this by raising the events from a different thread. But what does that thread do while it is waiting for other events, just exit?
I wanted to know how to create a thread that works like the UI thread, only it processes the events I want it to process. I am not sure how events work in .Net. I understand that event handlers are run on the thread that raises the event. I believe that .Net allocates threads from some thread pool to process events such as timer events. I am not clear on how it works, though, and what those threads are doing when they are not handling events.
Based on your comments I can see that what you want can best be solved by using the producer-consumer pattern. With this pattern the consumer thread is constructed and started in such a manner that it spins around a loop indefinitely waiting for items to appear in a queue. A UI thread will use this same pattern to implement its message loop. Here is how it works.
public class DedicatedProcessingThread
{
private BlockingCollection<object> m_Queue = new BlockingCollection<object>();
public Consumer()
{
new Thread(
() =>
{
while (true)
{
object item = m_Queue.Take(); // This blocks until an item appears.
// Do something with item here.
}
}).Start();
}
public void Post(object item)
{
m_Queue.Add(item);
}
}
The magic happens in the Take method. This method is designed to "suspend" (your terminology, not mine) or change the state of the thread to WaitSleepJoin while the queue is empty. Once an item is queued the consuming thread wakes up and the Take method returns the next item. That is the general pattern used in the message loop of a UI thread except instead of queueing plain old object instances Windows is posting System.Windows.Forms.Message values. You could do something similar by posting Delegate instances that would then be processed on the consumer thread once they arrive.
You can have the current thread sleep for a specified amount of milliseconds:
Threading.Thread.Sleep(100)
This will sleep for 1/10sec.
However if you need queued events to happen on the current thread, you can use:
Application.DoEvents()
The primary issue with using DoEvents is you don't know how much work actually gets done so it can be somewhat unreliable depending on what you are trying to accomplish.
If I use a performSelectorOnMainThread call inside a detached thread, when does the main thread execute the request? Does it do so immediately after it finishes the current main thread operation, or is there some other type of hierarchy that determines when the performSelectorOnMainThread call executes?
It executes on the main thread on the next iteration of the main thread's run loop.
Quoting Apple's documentation:
This method queues the message on the run loop of the main thread using the default run loop modes—that is, the modes associated with the NSRunLoopCommonModes constant. As part of its normal run loop processing, the main thread dequeues the message (assuming it is running in one of the default run loop modes) and invokes the desired method.