Waking a thread up from sleep when a collection is modified

Question

I have a method that works on a queue. After consuming the first object in the queue, it goes to sleep for a predefined period (say 10 secs). Is there a way to wake that thread up if the queue is modified by any other thread on the 3rd or 4th second?

Answer 1

You should be using a collection specifically designed for such a purpose. One example is BlockingCollection, which allows you to take an item from the collection and, if there are no items to take, the method will block until there is an item to give to you. It is also a collection that is specifically designed to be manipulated from multiple threads, easing your burden on synchronization.

Note that BlockingCollection can be initialized so that it's backed with different types of collections. By default it will use a ConcurrentQueue, but there are other collections in the System.Collections.Concurrent namespace that you can use if you don't want queue semantics (it seems you do though). You can also implement your own collection implementing IProducerConsumerCollection<T> if you really need something unique.