Force a Different Thread to Sleep

Question

So I have a program that serves as a sort of 'shell' for other programs. At its core, it gets passed a class, a method name, and some args, and handles the execution of the function, with the idea of allowing other programmers to basically schedule their processes to run on this shell service. Everything works fine except for one issue. Frequently, these processes that are scheduled for execution are very CPU heavy. At times, the processes called start using so much of the CPU, that the threads that I have which are responsible for checking schedules and firing off other jobs don't get a chance to run for quite some time, resulting in scheduling issues and a lack of sufficient responsiveness. Unfortunately, I can't insert Thread.Sleep() calls in the actual running code, as I don't really 'own' it.

So my question is: Is it possible to force an arbitrary thread (that I started) to sleep (yield) every so often, without modifying the actual code running in that thread? Barring that, is there some way to 'inject' Thread.Sleep() calls into code that I'm about to run dynamically, at run-time?

Answer 1

Not really. You could try changing the priority of the other thread with the Priority property, but you can't really inject a "sleep" call.

There's Thread.Suspend() but I strongly recommend you don't use it. You don't really want to get another thread to suspend at arbitrary times, as it might hold important resources. (That's why the method is marked as obsolete and has all kinds of warnings around it :)

Reducing the priority of the other tasks and potentially boosting the priority of your own tasks is probably the best approach.