Question

I saw these questions Recommendations for executing .NET HttpWebRequests in parallel in ASP.NET and Async.Parallel or Array.Parallel.Map from about a year ago and was wondering if the advice from them still stands or if there’s now a better approach with Task Parallel Library.

My case is closer to the second question, except I only need to hit 10(ish) different web-services instead of the same one 3000 times. As this is a web application, does that kind of request amplification change the suggested approach? Is there a better approach to take? How well can I expect something like this to scale as the number of users increases?

A few notes:

• Caching results will be the next implementation detail, but I would like to get the base functionality working first
• Each web-service returns very little data (under a kb), longest one takes no more than 3 seconds to return and I believe most of that is latency (generating results not computationally expensive)
• Calling web-services from the client won’t work (I don’t think) as some are in different domains
• Either C# of F# implementation would work as ideally this will be abstracted away to a method call that takes a string and returns a collection of strings

Answer 1

You might find this discussion relevant:Async instead of Parallel