Pro C# 2010 and the .NET 4 Platform, Fifth Edition

19.10. Understanding the CLR ThreadPool

The next thread-centric topic you will examine in this chapter is the role of the CLR thread pool. When you invoke a method asynchronously using delegate types (via the BeginInvoke() method), the CLR does not literally create a brand-new thread. For purposes of efficiency, a delegate's BeginInvoke() method leverages a pool of worker threads that is maintained by the runtime. To allow you to interact with this pool of waiting threads, the System.Threading namespace provides the ThreadPool class type.

If you wish to queue a method call for processing by a worker thread in the pool, you can make use of the ThreadPool.QueueUserWorkItem() method. This method has been overloaded to allow you to specify an optional ...