I have a C# application that has to constantly read from a program; sometimes there is a chance it will not find what it needs, which will throw an exception. This is a limitation of the program it has to read from.

This frequently causes the program to lock up as it tries to poll. So I solved it by spawning the 'polling' off into a separate thread. However watching the debugger, the thread is created and destroyed each time. I am uncertain if this is typical or not; but my question is, is this good practice, or am I using the threading for the wrong purpose?

ProgramReader
{ 
  static Thread oThread;
  public static void Read( Program program )
  {
    // check to see if the program exists
    if ( false )
      oThread = new ThreadStart(program.Poll);
    if(oThread != null || !oThread.IsAlive )
      oThread.Start();
  }
}

This is my general pseudocode. It runs every 10 seconds or so. Is this a huge hit to performance? The operation it performs is relatively small and lightweight; just repetitive.