I’m currently planning a Windows service. It will be a multi-threaded application which will continuously check for database records and process them. My first thoughts were to set a number of max available threads and create new thread for each process. This works OK but since I’m creating a new thread for every new process I fear that its overhead will multiply if there are lots of records to process. My question is, is this a good design or would you recommend any other solutions?

Here’s what the application will do basically:

1. Check for available number of threads
2. If there are available threads check the database for records to process.
3. If there are records to process select top 100 of them
4. Create a new process
5. Call a web service for each record and update the record according to web service call result (This call+update usually take around 500ms so process will be live for about 50 seconds)
6. Continue to step 1

This is currently what I am doing:

timer1.Tick += Tick();

private void Tick()
{
    //do some text logging
    //do some TextBox updating
}

int MaxThreads = 10

while(true)
{
    if(ThreadCount < MaxThreads)
    {
        new Thread(() => Process()).Start();
        ThreadCount++;
    }
    else
    {
        Thread.Sleep(10000);
    }
}

private void Process()
{
    //call ws
    //update records

    ThreadCount--;
}