Could you explain STA and MTA?

Question

Can you explain STA and MTA in your own words?

Also, what are apartment threads and do they pertain only to COM? If so, why?

Answer 1

The COM threading model is called an "apartment" model, where the execution context of initialized COM objects is associated with either a single thread (Single Thread Apartment) or many threads (Multi Thread Apartment). In this model, a COM object, once initialized in an apartment, is part of that apartment for the duration of its runtime.

The STA model is used for COM objects that are not thread safe. That means they do not handle their own synchronization. A common use of this is a UI component. So if another thread needs to interact with the object (such as pushing a button in a form) then the message is marshalled onto the STA thread. The windows forms message pumping system is an example of this.

If the COM object can handle its own synchronization then the MTA model can be used where multiple threads are allowed to interact with the object without marshalled calls.

Answer 2

Code that calls COM object dlls (for example, to read proprietary data files), may work fine in a user interface but hang mysteriously from a service. The reason is that as of .Net 2.0 user interfaces assume STA (thread-safe) while services assume MTA ((before that, services assumed STA). Having to create an STA thread for every COM call in a service can add significant overhead.

Answer 3

Each EXE which hosts COM or OLE controls defines it's apartment state. The apartment state is by default STA (and for most programs should be STA).

STA - All OLE controls by necessity must live in a STA. STA means that your COM-object must be always manipulated on the UI thread and cannot be passed to other threads (much like any UI element in MFC). However, your program can still have many threads.

MTA - You can manipulate the COM object on any thread in your program.

Answer 4

STA (Single Threaded Apartment) is basically the concept that only one thread will interact with your code at a time. Calls into your apartment are marshaled via windows messages (using a non-visible) window. This allows calls to be queued and wait for operations to complete.

MTA (Multi Threaded Apartment) is where many threads can all operate at the same time and the onus is on you as the developer to handle the thread security.

There is a lot more to learn about threading models in COM, but if you are having trouble understanding what they are then I would say that understanding what the STA is and how it works would be the best starting place because most COM objects are STA’s.

Apartment Threads, if a thread lives in the same apartment as the object it is using then it is an apartment thread. I think this is only a COM concept because it is only a way of talking about the objects and threads they interact with…

Answer 5

I find the existing explanations too gobbledygook. Here's my explanation in plain English:

STA: If a thread creates a COM object that's set to STA (when calling CoCreateXXX you can pass a flag that sets the COM object to STA mode), then only this thread can access this COM object (that's what STA means - Single Threaded Apartment), other thread trying to call methods on this COM object is under the hood silently turned into delivering messages to the thread that creates(owns) the COM object. This is very much like the fact that only the thread that created a UI control can access it directly. And this mechanism is meant to prevent complicated lock/unlock operations.

MTA: If a thread creates a COM object that's set to MTA, then pretty much every thread can directly call methods on it.

That's pretty much the gist of it. Although technically there're some details I didn't mention, such as in the 'STA' paragraph, the creator thread must itself be STA. But this is pretty much all you have to know to understand STA/MTA/NA.

Answer 6

As my understanding, the 'Apartment' is used to protect the COM objects from multi-threading issues.

If a COM object is not thread-safe, it should declare it as a STA object. Then only the thread who creates it can access it. The creation thread should declare itself as a STA thread. Under the hood, the thread stores the STA information in its TLS(Thread Local Storage). We call this behavior as that the thread enters a STA apartment. When other threads want to access this COM object, it should marshal the access to the creation thread. Basically, the creation thread uses messages mechanism to process the in-bound calls.

If a COM object is thread-safe, it should declare it as a MTA object. The MTA object can be accessed by multi-threads.