Speeding up realtime Gui updates from a thread

One of the best ways of posting updates to a GUI is to have the worker thread package up the data included in the update and place it in a queue. The UI thread will then poll the queue periodically. Having the worker thread use Control.Invoke to update the UI is way overused in my opinion. In contrast, having the UI thread poll for the updates has several advantages.

• It breaks the tight coupling between the UI and worker threads that Control.Invoke imposes.
• It puts the responsibility of updating the UI thread on the UI thread where it should belong anyway.
• The UI thread gets to dictate when and how often the update should take place.
• There is no risk of the UI message pump being overrun as would be the case with the marshaling techniques initiated by the worker thread.
• The worker thread does not have to wait for an acknowledgement that the update was performed before proceeding with its next steps (ie. you get more throughput on both the UI and worker threads).

You did not mention how ThreadOutput was implemented, but you might consider the approach I mentioned above if it is not already done that way. Experience has taught me that this is usually the best approach. Letting the UI thread throttle its update cycle is big a advantage.

Take a look into Thread Pooling instead of spinning new thread each time.