This post is a part of a series of posts on .NET Application performance. The first five articles are also available on our blog: Part 1; Part2 ; Part 3 ; part 4 ; part5

In our last article we discussed some guidelines to optimize Garbage Collection using the Dispose and Finalize methods. In this article we’ll look at best practices for using threading. The .NET Framework offers various threading and synchronization features. Using multiple threads can and will impact application performance and scalability.

Managed Threads and Operating System Threads

The CLR exposes managed threads, which are different from the Win32 threads. The logical thread is the managed version of a thread, while the Win32 thread is the physical thread that actually executes code. If you create a managed thread object and then do not start it by calling its Start method, a new Win32 thread is not created. When a managed thread is terminated or it completes, the underlying Win32 thread is destroyed. The Thread object is cleaned up only during garbage collection.

Be aware that poorly-written multithreaded code can lead to various problems including deadlocks, race conditions, thread starvation, and thread affinity. All of these can impact application performance, scalability, resilience, and correctness.
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In our last article we discussed some guidelines to optimize Garbage Collection. The garbage collector provides two more additional methods; Finalize and Dispose. We’ll discuss the guidelines for these methods in this article.

Finalize

Some objects require additional cleanup because they use unmanaged resources that need to be released. This is handled by finalization. An object registers for finalization by overriding the Object.Finalize method.

An object’s Finalize method is called before the object’s managed memory is reclaimed. This allows you to release any unmanaged resources that are maintained by the object. If you implement Finalize, you cannot control when this method should be called because this is left to the garbage collector.

The finalization process requires a minimum of two collection cycles to fully release the object’s memory. During the first collection pass, the object is marked for finalization. Finalization runs on a specialized thread that is independent from the garbage collector. After finalization occurs, the garbage collector can reclaim the object’s memory.
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