Thread Pool libraries or examples

I'm trying to utilize multi core technology as much as possible by throwing small, repetitive tasks onto a thread. When I read about this way of doing things, the thing that people referenced was a thread pool. Does anyone know any open source libraries, examples, or tutorials on how to write your own thread pooling architecture. I'm assuming its very easy, all you need is a queue and a bunch of worker threads and some sort of generic interface to access and process data.


EDIT: I am developing this on a win32 box, but generic examples are welcome (ie. one that uses boost or vanilla win32 thread calls).

Why on earth would you post this question in the Win32 forum?

Do you want a C or a C++ library?

There's also Win2k's Job Object API, which is basically a thread pool.

If you can use Boost's threads library, this is an OSS implementation. There's also the built-in threadpool in Win 2K+ which is, I think, to what CornedBee is referring.

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Originally Posted by CornedBee

Why on earth would you post this question in the Win32 forum?

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My engine is Windows only and I don't plan to move it to another platform anytime soon. At least, not until it's finished.

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Do you want a C or a C++ library?

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C++ Please.

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There's also Win2k's Job Object API, which is basically a thread pool.

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Good call. I'm looking at it now. How optimized is this library? Should I use it in a game engine which needs to be as close to real-time as possible?

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If you can use Boost's threads library, this is an OSS implementation. There's also the built-in threadpool in Win 2K+ which is, I think, to what CornedBee is referring.

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Thanks for the links!! :)

I would go with the Job Object API and redesign if you find that it's lacking.

Remember that Windows is not a Real-time OS, so real-time behaviour is a bit rough even at the best of times, and most attempts to "make it better" from an applications standpoint is going to be meaningless.

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Mats

You may want to look at ACE. It is substantially more than a threading library (it is actually designed to support concurrent communications), but one of the many incidental capabilities it supports is multithreading and thread pools. Not exactly the easiest library to use, but the power is there.

Possibly use the thread pool API?

EDIT: I'm not sure how you would use Job Objects for thread pooling. Per MSDN, they're used to manage a group of processes not threads.

For example, the following code has a parent and child process. The parent being the process that started notepad.exe. The child is notepad.exe. If a job object were NOT used in the following sample, terminating the parent (the process that started notepad.exe) via the task manager would NOT terminate the child, notepad.exe. So, a job object is used to manage both the parent and child process. Using a job object now terminates notepad.exe when the parent process is terminated via the task manager.

Code:

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#define _WIN32_WINNT 0x0500
#include <windows.h>

int main(void)
{
    HANDLE                              hJob;
    JOBOBJECT_EXTENDED_LIMIT_INFORMATION jeli = { 0 };
    PROCESS_INFORMATION                  pi  = { 0 };
    STARTUPINFO                          si  = { 0 };
    hJob = CreateJobObject(NULL, NULL);
    jeli.BasicLimitInformation.LimitFlags = JOB_OBJECT_LIMIT_KILL_ON_JOB_CLOSE;
    SetInformationJobObject(hJob, JobObjectExtendedLimitInformation, &jeli, sizeof(jeli));
    si.cb = sizeof(si);
    CreateProcess( NULL, "notepad.exe",  NULL, NULL, FALSE, CREATE_SUSPENDED,NULL, NULL, &si, &pi );
    AssignProcessToJobObject(hJob, pi.hProcess);
    ResumeThread(pi.hThread);
    WaitForSingleObject( pi.hProcess, INFINITE );
    CloseHandle( pi.hProcess );
    CloseHandle( pi.hThread );
    return 0;
}

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