Eric Eilebrecht's blog

It's now been more than 16 months since I promised to post about the improvements we made in the ThreadPool's concurrency control algorithm for CLR 4. Lesson: don't promise to write a series of articles unless you've got the time to do it! Luckily...

Charles from Channel 9 stopped by my office a couple of weeks ago to chat with Erika Parsons and I about the ThreadPool work we're doing for .NET 4 . I learned something from this: understanding something, and explaining it in person, for the first time...

This is the first in a series of posts about the improvements we are making to the CLR thread pool for CLR 4.0 (which will ship with Visual Studio 2010). This post will cover changes to the queuing infrastructure in the thread pool, which aim to enable...

It's been a while since I've posted; for the past several months I've been working on deep changes in the CLR ThreadPool to support the Parallel Extensions to the .NET Framework. I hope to say a few things about the changes we're making in the CLR...

A question recently came up on an internal discussion forum, which I'll paraphrase: The Windows QueueUserWorkItem API has an option to queue to an I/O thread. Why doesn't the managed ThreadPool.QueueUserWorkItem support this option? First, some background...

This has been discussed fairly frequently on the Web. Chris Brumme discusses this here: http://blogs.msdn.com/cbrumme/archive/2003/04/15/51351.aspx Raymond Chen discusses this here: http://blogs.msdn.com/oldnewthing/archive/2004/12/31/344799...

.NET 3.5 SP1 (A.K.A. CLR 2.0 SP2) is now available as a Beta release. This beta release has the fix for the ThreadPool ramp-up issue discussed here and here . It also has some other improvements to the ThreadPool's thread creation algorithm that can...

Shortly after the release of CLR 2.0 SP1 (a.k.a. Orcas or .NET 3.5), several customers noticed some very odd behavior in the ThreadPool. The ThreadPool is supposed to create threads as fast as possible, up to the current setting for MinThreads - but it...

The managed ThreadPool provides a way to asynchronously wait for WaitHandles, via ThreadPool.RegisterWaitForSingleObject. This method returns a new instance of RegisteredWaitHandle, which has a single method: Unregister. It's obvious from the name that...

In this article , Vance Morrison describes some of the issues involved in writing managed multithreaded code that avoids the use of locks. In particular, he discusses the impact of memory models on lock-free (or low-lock) programming. For managed code...

The .NET framework currently offers several synchronization primitives: Monitors (via the Monitor class. C# users know this as the "lock" statement) Two varieties of reader/writer lock (ReaderWriterLock / ReaderWriterLockSlim) Events (ManualResetEvent...

Can the program below ever print “oops?” #include <stdio.h> #include <process.h> struct Globals { volatile int start; int a; int b; volatile int end; }; Globals globals; void WriterThread( void *)...

Welcome to my new blog. I just moved to the Common Language Runtime team here in rainy Redmond, after spending nearly seven years in sunny California developing storage services for Hotmail (now Windows Live Mail). Luckily, I spent three years prior to...