Unity’s job system lets you create multithreaded code so that your application can use all available CPU cores to execute your code. This provides improved performance because your application uses the capacity of all the CPU cores it’s running on more efficiently, rather than running all code on one CPU core.
You can use the job system by itself, but for improved performance, you should also use the Burst compiler, which is specifically designed to compile jobs for Unity’s job system. The Burst compiler has improved code generation, which results in increased performance and a reduction of battery consumption on mobile devices.
You can also use the job system with Unity’s Entity Component System to create high performance data-oriented code.
Unity uses its own native job system to process its own native code over multiple worker threads, which are dependent on the number of CPU cores available on the device your application runs on. Usually Unity executes your code on one thread which runs by default at the start of the program, called the main thread. However, when you use the job system, Unity executes your code over the worker threads, which is called multithreading.
Multithreading takes advantage of a CPU’s capability to process a lot of threads at the same time across multiple cores. Instead of tasks or instructions executing one after another, they run simultaneously. The worker threads run in parallel to one another, and synchronize their results with the main thread once completed.
The job system ensures that there are only enough threads to match the capacity of the CPU cores, which means that you can schedule as many tasks as you need without specifically needing to know how many CPU cores are available. This differs from other job systems that rely on techniques such as thread pooling, where it’s easier to inefficiently create more threads than CPU cores.
The job system uses work stealing as part of its scheduling strategy to even out the amount of tasks shared across worker threads. Worker threads might process tasks faster than others, so once a worker thread has finished processing all of its tasks, it looks at the other worker threads’ queues and then processes tasks assigned to another worker thread.
To make it easier to write multithreaded code, the job system has a safety system that detects all potential race conditions and protects you from the bugs they can cause. A race condition happens when the output of one operation depends on the timing of another process outside of its control.
For example, if the job system sends a reference to data from your code in the main thread to a job, it can’t verify whether the main thread is reading the data at the same time the job is writing to it. This scenario creates a race condition.
To solve this problem, the job system sends each job a copy of the data it needs to operate on rather than a reference to the data in the main thread. This copy isolates the data, which eliminates the race condition.
The way that the job system copies data means that a job can only access blittable data types. These types don’t need conversion when passed between managed and native code.
The job system uses memcpy to copy blittable types and transfer the data between the managed and native parts of Unity. It uses memcpy to put data into native memory when scheduling jobs and gives the managed side access to that copy when executing jobs. For more information, see Scheduling jobs.
In addition to the job system provided in the core Unity engine, the Collections package extends many of the job types and native containers. For more information, see the Collections documentation.