Alternative to threads

Hi all i have a program that comes up and spawns 10 threads that each contain a UDP socket. As you can imagine this eats up a lot of %CPU. I was curious is there something that I could use in place of the threads to lower the %CPU?

As you can imagine this eats up a lot of %CPU

No I'm not...
10 Threads is really nothing, the problem is probably more related to what are the threads doing? If they're polling on a condition without sleeping between test, only 1 thread is sufficient to see your CPU burn...

Originally Posted by mhogue As you can imagine this eats up a lot of %CPU.

Sounds like bad programming. Are you doing blocking reads on the sockets? Are you using a blocking select to determine when to read a socket? If not, the CPU usage is your fault.

I wrote a TCP server that spawned a separate thread for each connection from 120 separate clients that were constantly communicating. CPU usage was around 25%.

So I figured it out thanks for the replies though. I'm using UDP multicast not TCP by the way, I have several threads that are send and several that are receiving. I discovered when the transmission rate was extremely high e.g. 60 Hz and 1024 packet sizes it would spike my cpu usage. With a change to each packet size was able to knock it down a lot thanks for the help

Originally Posted by mhogue I'm using UDP multicast not TCP by the way...

Can you describe your architecture in more detail? Why are you using multicast instead of unicast?

Originally Posted by mhogue I have several threads that are send and several that are receiving.

Are all the threads running on the same machine? Is the machine sending multicast packets to itself? Do you have more than one machine? If so, how are the machines arranged?

Originally Posted by mhogue I discovered when the transmission rate was extremely high e.g. 60 Hz and 1024 packet sizes it would spike my cpu usage.

Assuming 10 senders, 60 * 10 * 1024 * Hz = 600 KB/s = 7.2 Mbps. If your Ethernet is only 10 Mbps and running in half-duplex mode, I see a potential problem.

Once again, assuming 10 senders, 60 * 10 * Hz = 600 packets per second.

I would not consider either number very large assuming you are using a Pentium 4 class machine with gigabit Ethernet to do the processing. What processing to you perform on each packet?