Question on performance (events vs. timer)

[Kyjan]

Greetings to all!

I have a question about events vs. timers. I want to know what you guys think and/or have experienced. Thank you in advance for reading this!

I have an object that communicates back and forth with a web service. Now, this object is currently instantiated in all forms where I need to communicate with the web service. This works fine; however, I can have an instance where multiple requests are going off at the same time, even from the same form (I have user controls that asynchronously communicate as well).

I want to create a "collection" type of class that manages how many requests are being made at a given time (no more than a set limit). The class would hold a collection of these web communicators.

My question is this. Performance wise (and any other considerations I may not be thinking about), would it be better to have a method on the collection class that raises an event in the communicator object, telling it to communicate, or would it be better to have a timer running in the collection class that every so often (500-1000ms), it checks the queue to see if there are any pending communication requests and fires them off.

Thoughts?

Thanks!

Kyjan