I have a .NET 3.5 Windows Service. I'm testing with a small application that just sleeps threads after starting them, for random timespans of 300 to 6500ms. I have various questions about this issue.
- Is
BackgroundWorkerreally intended for use just in WinForms applications or is this just nonsense, how exactly is it tuned to this effect? - I've read about
ThreadPools in this question and this one. I'm not exactly sure how much it is a problem for me that the threads would last somewhere between half a second and a few seconds. Is this reason enough to look somewhere else? - Am I best off just creating the background threads myself?
The real-life service will poll the database for a list of pending requests, execute threads for each of those requests (limited to a certain amount of concurrent threads) and each thread will be checking if some data exists in a database, retrieve it if it does, or download it from a streaming API, store it, and return that data. The downloading would be the part that consumes the most time.
I would really like this question to be answered for .NET 3.5 Framework, but if there are better or more efficient ways to accomplish this under .NET 4.0, I would like to read about them too. Links with more info are also very much welcome.