throttle consumer in producer/consumer threads

There is a single consumer and single producer thread. The producer thread data acquisition is slow. It queries a socket for data and the time it takes to produce data for the consumer is significantly longer than the time it takes for the consumer to process and send the data out. The problem is I am updating a display so I开发者_运维问答 want the updates to slow down so they appear continuous rather than update in bursts.

I am using a double buffer right now but the consumer is waiting too long for the buffers to be swapped because the producer is taking too long to produce data. Perhaps if I slice up the data into smaller blocks and use a queue instead? That way the producer would feed the consumer a little at a time? Has anyone ever run into this problem?

Why not have a thread that updates the screen once a sec? The thread can sleep for a sec, wake up, check into what the producer and the consumer are doing, and update the screen based on their progress. You would get updates every second. If you want them faster or slower, then change the timer interval.

I am going to lock the send rate to the client to a frequency based on the rate of the data request. I originally thought the producer was going to be much faster than it was so that is why I made it into a producer/consumer thread. This is more like a frame rate problem where I need to synchronize the output at a consistent rate.