How to thread single-threaded applications

Introduction

CommandThreader is a command line tool that runs commands, line by line, but instead of it running only one at a time, it executes a batch of them so as one closes, it automatically starts a new command. The list of commands is provided via an input file and the number of simultaneous running commands is specified as a number of allowed threads.

Implementation

Download and extract CommandThreader.zip (VirusTotal Scan Result) to a folder of your choice, on the computer that it will be scheduled to run on.

Demo Execution

In this demo, I execute a dummy application called DummyApp.exe. All this application does is delay for a random number of seconds and as a return code returns this numbers of seconds that it delays for. This can be any application that takes a long time to complete, but is not resources intensive.

Input File

C:\Temp\DummyApp\DummyApp.exe|DummyArgument|C:\Temp\DummyApp|false|true|60
C:\Temp\DummyApp\DummyApp.exe|DummyArgument|C:\Temp\DummyApp|false|true|60
C:\Temp\DummyApp\DummyApp.exe|DummyArgument|C:\Temp\DummyApp|false|true|60
C:\Temp\DummyApp\DummyApp.exe|DummyArgument|C:\Temp\DummyApp|false|true|60
C:\Temp\DummyApp\DummyApp.exe|DummyArgument|C:\Temp\DummyApp|false|true|60
C:\Temp\DummyApp\DummyApp.exe|DummyArgument|C:\Temp\DummyApp|false|true|60
C:\Temp\DummyApp\DummyApp.exe|DummyArgument|C:\Temp\DummyApp|false|true|60
C:\Temp\DummyApp\DummyApp.exe|DummyArgument|C:\Temp\DummyApp|false|true|60
C:\Temp\DummyApp\DummyApp.exe|DummyArgument|C:\Temp\DummyApp|false|true|60
C:\Temp\DummyApp\DummyApp.exe|DummyArgument|C:\Temp\DummyApp|false|true|60
C:\Temp\DummyApp\DummyApp.exe|DummyArgument|C:\Temp\DummyApp|false|true|60
C:\Temp\DummyApp\DummyApp.exe|DummyArgument|C:\Temp\DummyApp|false|true|60
C:\Temp\DummyApp\DummyApp.exe|DummyArgument|C:\Temp\DummyApp|false|true|60
C:\Temp\DummyApp\DummyApp.exe|DummyArgument|C:\Temp\DummyApp|false|true|60
...

Input File breakdown

C:\Temp\DummyApp\DummyApp.exe|DummyArgument|C:\Temp\DummyApp|false|true|60

Command to run

Arguments for the command

Working folder

Execute command hidden

Wait for command to exit

Maximum amount of time that CommandThreader should wait before killing process

CommandThreader Command

With the command below a total of 5 threads will be maintained

CommandThreader.exe DummyInput.txt 5

CommandThreader Output

Conclusion

With CommandThreader, the time taken to run a 100s long running processes can be drastically reduced.