I have a list of work items that need to be processed in order. Sometimes the list will be empty, sometimes it will have a thousand items. Only one can be processed at a time and in order. Currently I am doing the following which to me looks stupid because i am using Thread.Sleep in the consumer task to wait for 100ms before checking if the list is empty or not. Is this the standard way to do it or am I completely wrong.
public class WorkItem
{
}
public class WorkerClass
{
CancellationTokenSource cts = new CancellationTokenSource();
CancellationToken ct = new CancellationToken();
List<WorkItem> listOfWorkItems = new List<WorkItem>();
public void start()
{
Task producerTask = new Task(() => producerMethod(ct), ct);
Task consumerTask = new Task(() => consumerMethod(ct), ct);
producerTask.Start();
consumerTask.Start();
}
public void producerMethod(CancellationToken _ct)
{
while (!_ct.IsCancellationRequested)
{
//Sleep random amount of time
Random r = new Random();
Thread.Sleep(r.Next(100, 1000));
WorkItem w = new WorkItem();
listOfWorkItems.Add(w);
}
}
public void consumerMethod(CancellationToken _ct)
{
while (!_ct.IsCancellationRequested)
{
if (listOfWorkItems.Count == 0)
{
//Sleep small small amount of time to avoid continuously polling this if statement
Thread.Sleep(100);
continue;
}
//Process first item
doWorkOnWorkItem(listOfWorkItems[0]);
//Remove from list
listOfWorkItems.RemoveAt(0);
}
}
public void doWorkOnWorkItem(WorkItem w)
{
// Do work here - synchronous to execute in order (10ms to 5min execution time)
}
}
Advise greatly appreciated.
Thanks
