Question

I am wanting to write some web services using WCF.

I would like to have a “thread pool” in my web service.
For example, I have nearly 6gb of data I need to manipulate.

I would like the client to call an operation on the webservice and have a new task or thread created. The client is able to call a ListRunningTasks(); and have the webservice return a list of tasks. The client should be able to forcefully kill a task if it is taking too long e.g. KillTask(int taskID); or something. I have previously done some threading, but not inside WCF or a service that doesn’t have state. Is this possible? If so, how would one go about implementing such a thing? Any reading, links or suggestions would be great.

Thanks, Mike.

Answer 1

One possible solution:

• Implement explicit queues for your outstanding tasks taking into consideration that they take that long (20-30mins as you wrote).

• Build a custom component to manage those queues e.g. you might even want capabilities to persist them, resume work when you restart the service etc.

• Have explicitly created worker threads that pickup work from those queues.

• Implement a WCF service to make your queue manager available to external systems.

Thread pools are more designed to process a high volume of short-running tasks.