Re: What's better a separate run loop or separate thread?
Re: What's better a separate run loop or separate thread?
- Subject: Re: What's better a separate run loop or separate thread?
- From: Shawn Erickson <email@hidden>
- Date: Sat, 10 Jul 2004 08:29:41 -0700
On Jul 10, 2004, at 2:12 AM, Ken Tozier wrote:
I have a number of processes that need to run constantly in the
background while my app does other things and I'm wondering if it
would be better to create dedicated run loops for them with NSTimers
for the required methods or to fork a thread with a timer.
A run loop runs in a thread and only one exists per thread.
Your main thread is running one that is hooked up with event sources
and started by NSApplication. You can schedule timers against this run
loop but the processing will be done in your main thread when the timer
call back takes place which may or may not cause it to become
unresponsive to user input (not sure how long or intense the processing
is that you want to do). Of course the call back could pass off the
work to a back ground thread (I have done stuff like this using a
custom built thread poll framework, one that keeps some amount of
threads ready and can queue things if you put a limit on how many
threads you want running).
So if it was me... I would fire up a new thread and depending on how
you want to work with things start up a run loop in that thread with
timers, and ports, etc. The documentation on NSRunLoop and the
programming topics linked to from that documentation should be
sufficient to do what is needed.
In particular...
<
http://developer.apple.com/documentation/Cocoa/Conceptual/
InputControl/Tasks/runningloops.html>
-Shawn
_______________________________________________
cocoa-dev mailing list | email@hidden
Help/Unsubscribe/Archives:
http://www.lists.apple.com/mailman/listinfo/cocoa-dev
Do not post admin requests to the list. They will be ignored.