wpftask-parallel-librarythreadpoolwork-stealing

WPF Dispatcher and Work Stealing?


I have an application which uses WPF for its GUI but, on command kicks off a very heavy processing load. I noticed that my GUI was rather sluggish when the engine (heavy processing) was running and when using the 'Application Timeline' tool in VS2015, I noticed that some of my engine code was being run on the UI thread.

The engine is started with the following line which, if i understand the LongRunningflag, creates a new thread and runs the given function on that thread.

        rootTask = Task.Factory.StartNew(DoWork, TaskCreationOptions.LongRunning);

The DoWork method referenced above repeatedly uses Parallel.For to queue up hundreds of tasks.

Is it possible that the dispatcher thread is 'helping-out' by running tasks from the TaskScheduler queue? If so, is it possible to prevent this to keep the GUI responsive (allbeit to the detriment of the background tasks)?


Solution

  • Is it possible that the dispatcher thread is 'helping-out' by running tasks from the TaskScheduler queue?

    No, as far as I know, that's not possible. If some code that comes from the Task really executes on the dispatcher thread, then that means the task had to explicity schedule it there.