I am trying to improve the performance of the threaded application with real-time deadlines. It is running on Windows Mobile and written in C / C++. I have a suspicion that high frequency of thread switching might be causing tangible overhead, but can neither prove it or disprove it. As everybody knows, lack of proof is not a proof of opposite :).

Thus my question is twofold:

• If exists at all, where can I find any actual measurements of the cost of switching thread context?

• Without spending time writing a test application, what are the ways to estimate the thread switching overhead in the existing application?

• Does anyone know a way to find out the number of context switches (on / off) for a given thread?