Question : Does waiting for a web service's reponse use "clock cycles"?

I just move my web service call to a separate Windows program so that my single-threaded primary applicaiotn would not get dragged down, performance wise. So this is working well.

I now time how much was spent waiting for the web service to reply, so my question is whether the time it's waiting is using up scarce clock cycles? I wold like to double the frequencey of the calls, which take about 300-500 millisenconds each. But I wory about making as much processor available to my primary program as possible.

So does this utility program's waiting time for the web service impact processor time or load?

Very interested in finding out...

Thanks,
newbieweb

Answer : Does waiting for a web service's reponse use "clock cycles"?

If the service is accessed synchronously, then the thread is blocked while waiting for the response.  While the thread is blocked, the processor is freed up for other processes/threads of execution.  If it's asynchronous, the thread is not blocked, but unless the program has busy work while waiting for the response, the thread will be idle, and will not consume cpu resources.  If you don't know which you are using, then you are likely using a synchronous call.

So the answer is no, waiting for the web service response does not use clock cycles.  Doubling the frequency of the calls will still leave lots and lots of idle time for the other process to function.