Question

I have a program that does the following:

1. Call webservice (there are many calls to the same web service)

2. Process the result of 1.

3. Insert result of 2. in a DB

So I think it should be better to do some multithreading. I think I can do it like this:

• one thread is the master (let’s call it A)

• it creates some thread which calls the webservices (let’s call it W)

• when W has some results it sends it to A (or A detects that W has some stuff)

• A sends the results to some computing thread (let’s call it C)

• when C has some results it sends it to A (or A detects that C has some stuff)

• A sends the results to some database thread (let’s call it D)

So sometimes C or D will wait for work to do.

With this technique I’ll be able to set the thread number for each task.

Can you please tell me how I can do that, maybe if there is any pattern.
EDIT : I added “some” instead of “a”, so I’ll create many thread for some time-consuming process, and maybe only one for the fastest.

Answer 1

It sounds to me like you could use the producer/consumer pattern. With .NET 4 this has become really simple to implement. Start a number of Tasks and use the BlockingCollection<T> as a buffer between the tasks. Check out this post for details.