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Welcome to the Bread Winner wiki.
Bread winner is an implementation of producer consumer paradigm in C#. The whole goal of the library is to keep it as lightweight as possible, whilst giving the responsibility and the flexibility to adapt it to their own needs.
As stated in the readme, this library relies heavily on threads. TPL should be avoided when using it, even at the cost of synchronously waiting tasks when no synchronous API is available.
Every worker instance uses it's own thread, therefore use with caution at your own risk.
The main reason to write this library emerged from the need of downloading multiple files from Azure Blob Storage, decoding them and loading them in a shared memory cache with a Web API application. The main caveat of the process is that all async programming from TPL cannot be involved, as there is no guarantee which thread is going to pick up the task after you await. This means that you'd be stealing threads from Web API threadpool, which should be used to serve your client's requests exclusively.
The overhead of creating threads is minimal and mainly affects memory. The consumers are, as a matter of fact, all waiting for signals, and won't be scheduled unless there is some work to do. Moreover, it's possible to set up the priority of the threads wrapped in the workers, making the approach more flexible for what regards the scheduling. There is no concrete implementation of the producer in the library itself, but one is offered in the samples. This would normally be the only element that would be polling a source, and would be scheduled. If the schedule is not a very short period, the overhead caused by context switching the producer process would be minimal. The ratio has to be though that the producer would the minimum amount of work required to create work items to be consumed by the consumers.