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I am writing a Windows Application in C# that will essentially be a multi-threaded one. But I am in a fix because this application can be run on a Celeron/P-IV system to a Core i7 system. So, I am unable to decide how to determine the number of threads to spawn for this application.

Is there any way to determining how many threads I can spawn depending on the processor used to leverage the maximum power of the CPU as well as make my application not lag/slow down/freeze? Is there any kind of general formula that you use?

Thanks.

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I'd consider using the ThreadPool. As far as I know, the .NET framework manages the optimum number of threads itself (http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/0ka9477y.aspx).

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Environment.ProcessorCount is what you're looking for.

For the second part of your question, the best way to do that is with testing a different number of threads. It all depends on what exactly your threads are doing, do they spend a large time blockig, or they may be sharing common system resources, hitting each others cache lines, whatever, so you can't really give a general formula for this sort of thing. It's all heavily dependent on your specific thread behavior.

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To get the number of logical processors you can use System.Environment.ProcessorCount, however it will be different from actual processors/cores count on a HyperThreading enabled systems. To get more accurate information you will need to use WMI metadata Win32_ComputerSystem.NumberOfProcessors and Win32_ComputerSystem.NumberOfLogicalProcessors.

However I would recommend to let the system take care of scheduling and use one of the high level multithreading subsystems like Tasks or ThreadPool

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