Is a Semaphore the right tool for this video sequence capture/save job?

I am working on a WPF project with C# (.NET 4.0) to capture a sequence of 300 video frames from a high-speed camera that need to be saved to disk (BMP format). The video frames need to be captured in near-exact time intervals, so I can't save the frames to disk as they're being captured -- the disk I/O is unpredictable and it throws off the time intervals between frames. The capture card has about 60 frame buffers available.

I'm not sure what the best approach is for implementing a solution to this problem. My initial thoughts are to create a "BufferToDisk" thread that saves the images from the frame buffers as they become available. In this scenario, the main thread captures a frame buffer and then signals the thread to indicate that it is OK to save the frame. The problem is that the frames are being captured quicker than the thread can save the files, so there needs to be some kind of synchronization to deal with this. I was thinking a Semaphore would be a good tool for this job. I have never used a Semaphore in this way, though, so I'm not sure how to proceed.

Is this a reasonable approach to this problem? If so, can someone post some code to get me started?

Any help is much appreciated.

Edit: After looking over the linked "Threading in C# - Part 2" book excerpt, I decided to implement the solution by adapting the "ProducerConsumerQueue" class example. Here is my adapted code:

class ProducerConsumerQueue : IDisposable
{
    EventWaitHandle _wh = new AutoResetEvent(false);
    Thread _worker;
    readonly object _locker = new object();
    Queue<string> _tasks = new Queue<string>();

    public ProducerConsumerQueue()
    {
        _worker = new Thread(Work);
        _worker.Start();
    }

    public void EnqueueTask(string task)
    {
        lock (_locker) _tasks.Enqueue(task);
        _wh.Set();
    }

    public void Dispose()
    {
        EnqueueTask(null);     // Signal the consumer to exit.
        _worker.Join();         // Wait for the consumer's thread to finish.
        _wh.Close();            // Release any OS resources.
    }

    void Work()
    {
        while (true)
        {
            string task = null;
            lock (_locker)
                if (_tasks.Count > 0)
                {
                    task = _tasks.Dequeue();
                    if (task == null)
                    {
                        return;
                    }
                }
            if (task != null)
            {
                // parse the parameters from the input queue item
                string[] indexVals = task.Split(',');
                int frameNum = Convert.ToInt32(indexVals[0]);
                int fileNum = Convert.ToInt32(indexVals[1]);
                string path = indexVals[2];
                // build the file name
                string newFileName = String.Format("img{0:d3}.bmp", fileNum);
                string fqfn = System.IO.Path.Combine(path, newFileName);
                // save the captured image to disk
                int ret = pxd_saveBmp(1, fqfn, frameNum, 0, 0, -1, -1, 0, 0);
            }
            else
            {
                _wh.WaitOne();         // No more tasks - wait for a signal
            }
        }
    }
}

Using the class in the main routine:

// capture bitmap images and save them to disk
using (ProducerConsumerQueue q = new ProducerConsumerQueue())
{
     for (int i = 0; i < 300; i++)
     {
         if (curFrmBuf > numFrmBufs)
         {
              curFrmBuf = 1;  // wrap around to the first frame buffer
         }

         // snap an image to the image buffer
         int ret = pxd_doSnap(1, curFrm开发者_开发问答Buf, 0);

         // build the parameters for saving the frame to image file (for the queue)
         string fileSaveParams = curFrmBuf + "," + (i + 1) + "," + newPath;
         q.EnqueueTask(fileSaveParams);

         curFrmBuf++;
    }
}

Pretty slick class -- a small amount of code for this functionality.

Thanks so much for the suggestions, guys.

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Sure, sounds reasonable. You can use semaphores or other thread synchronization primitives. This sounds like a standard producer/consumer problem. Take a look here for some pseudo-code .

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What happens if the disk is so slow (e.g. some other process pegs it) that 60 frame buffers are not enough? Maybe you'll need a BufferToMemory and BufferToDisk thread or some sort of combination. You'll want the main thread (capture to buffer) to have the highest priority, BufferToMemory medium, and BufferToDisk the lowest.

Anyway, back to Semaphores, I recommend you read this: http://www.albahari.com/threading/part2.aspx#_Semaphore. Semaphores should do the trick for you, though I would recommend SemaphoreSlim (.NET 4).

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Since you're treating this as a producer/consumer problem (judging by your reply to @siz's answer), you might want to look at BlockingCollection<T>, which is designed for precisely this sort of scenario.

It allows any number of producer threads to push data into the collection, and any number of consumer threads to pull it out again. In this case, you probably want just one producer and one consumer thread.

The BlockingCollection<T> does all the work of making sure the consumer thread only wakes up and processes work once the producing thread has said that there's more work to do. And it also takes care of allowing a queue of work to build up.