Question

I have recently moved to C#.net 4.

I love Parallel.For, but not sure when to use and when not to.
I know that when order is not important for me – I’ll use it.

But are there any tests regarding the overhead of working with Parallels? Meaning, if my loop runs only 10 times (and performs very little logic) – should I avoid Parallels? Are there any thumb rules?

Answer 1

I would avoid using Parallel.For unless performance is an issue.

Writing code that runs concurrently is in general harder than writing single threaded code. Furthermore if you make an error due to a concurrency issue it can be difficult to debug it. For example the bug might occur only sometimes and not be easily reproducible. Unless you have a specific need for increased performance I would suggest that you keep it simple and use an ordinary loop on a single thread.