Question

I am building a simple ASP.NET website, which will receive SMSes via a 3rd party SMS API (through URL push), and then the website will acknowledge the senders by sending SMSes back to them. I am saving the incoming SMSes in a database. I have implemented the logic as below:

public partial class _Default : System.Web.UI.Page
{    
    protected void Page_Load(object sender, EventArgs e)
    {
     //declaring variables to be used elsewhere, but in this same class. I have just this one class.  
     //Grabbing the URL parameters here (contents of SMS). 
     //Saving SMSes in the database. Database interaction happening only inside Page_Load. 
      //Call these functions
      SomeLogicFunction();
      SendSMSFunction(); 
    } 

    SomeLogicFunction()
    {
    }

    SendSMSFunction()
     {
     }
}

Now, I have read somewhere that ASP.NET takes care of multi-threading and similar aspects. So, if I have a simple website like this, do I need to take care of multi-threading? Or Page_Load function/ASP.NET pretty much handles it automatically?

If the answer is I don’t need to do anything, then its all awesome!
But if I have to take care of multi-threading, can you please help with some tips on how should I approach? I expect few thousand SMSes.

Thanks.

Answer 1

By default, for each request that comes in, ASP.NET grab a thread pool thread, make a new instance of your Page class, and call the appropriate Page_Load and event functions on that thread. It will use multiple threads for multiple requests simultaneously. Just be careful that any state you have in static members and fields is being properly shared and synchronized. Of course, avoid the shared state if possible.

ASP.NET and IIS will begin to reject requests if there are enough requests already being processed, so make sure your processing times are sufficiently fast. If you run into bottlenecks, you can increase the number of requests happening in parallel. If you have really high load (say hundreds of requests a second), there are asynchrony APIs you can use to increase the number of in-flight requests even further. But start out simple, of course, and you’ll probably be fine.