Clever Geek Handbook

Does anyone know how System.Windows.Forms.Timer affects the host application and the system in general?

Does anyone know how it System.Windows.Forms.Timer

affects the host application and the system as a whole?

In a threaded background loop, on the one hand, there is a lot of CPU usage%, while a Timer

very high tick rate has no effect in Windows Task Manager.

Is the high tick rate timer delaying the Windows Message loop or?

+1


source to share


2 answers


Define "high speed timer" :).

The problem with timer components using WM_TIMER (e.g. Windows.Forms one) is manifold:



  • You won't be able to get more than 50ms resolution from it, ever.
  • If your system is under stress (like heavy redrawing, working on RDP links, etc.), you can receive WM_TIMER messages every 500ms or more, no matter how low you set the interval.
  • WM_TIMER messages are synthetic messages and may not be delivered to your application at all for long periods of time if the message queue is flooded with other messages.
  • If your timer method takes more than one timer interval to execute, the timer will "skip" the message; you won't get another WM_TIMER message until you return from the first one. In other words, you will never receive two WM_TIMER messages one after the other in sequence.
+3


source


All in all I haven't noticed a lot of negative references to using the timer component inside my application, they are much more efficient and better on resources than some of the other methods out there.

I find this "Timer Comparison" from Microsoft helps to compare these types of things as well.



But long and short that they don't seem to clutter too much.

+1


source






More articles:


All Articles