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Editorial Team
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Asked: 2026-06-15T21:39:07+00:00

I have an Azure worker role running in a an extra small instance. All

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I have an Azure worker role running in a an extra small instance. All it does is dequeue all the messages from a storage queue, and insert them into table storage in chunks of 100.

I was wondering if it makes sense to spawn multiple threads when inserting these chunks even though the instance is only a single core. My thought was that since insertion is an asynchronous process (though I’m using the API calls that make it look synchronous) that maybe the core spends most it’s time waiting and I may see a performance boost by inserting in parallel.

The inserts go into 10 table partitions, so it would be really easy to paralellize across partitions. Is that my best bet? Can I use PLINQ to do this? I know that PLINQ optimizes thread usage based on the number of cores, so would it even spawn multiple threads in this case? What if I used the async versions of the insert calls, wouldn’t that have the effect of spawning multiple threads when the calls to table storage returned?

Thanks!

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1 Answer

  1. Editorial Team

    You could spawn multiple threads and it would probably run faster. As you noted, most of the time is spent in I/O, so the CPU could switch between them.

    However, using the async versions of the calls (the Begin/End style calls, or the newer DoSomethingAsync() style calls if you’re using .NET 4.5 and the latest SDK) will perform much better. Under the covers these calls use I/O completion ports which are a much more efficient way to handle I/O. There are probably some good comparison out there, but my own informal testing found the async methods to be around 10x faster.

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