Question

I’m creating a multi-threaded random.org number getter to implement into my c# IRC bot. The issue I have is, it uses a moderately big memory footprint. I think it’s the WebClient class. I dislike how it uses ~5,000K memory just for connecting to the url, and reading the first line and outputting the number.

Is there a lighter approach to this?

class Program
    {
        static void Main(string[] args)
        {
            for (int i = 0; i < 4; i++)
            {
                Thread More = new Thread(GetRandomNum);
                More.Start();
            }
        }
        public static void GetRandomNum()
        {
            string number;
            for (int i = 0; i < 100; i++)
            {
                using (WebClient client = new WebClient())
                {
                    number = client.DownloadString("http://www.random.org/integers/?num=1&min=1&max=100&col=1&base=10&format=plain&rnd=new");
                }
                Console.WriteLine(number.Trim());
            }
        }
    }

Answer 1

WebRequest will do the trick.

WebRequest request = WebRequest.Create ("http://www.random.org/integers/?num=1&min=1&max=100&col=1&base=10&format=plain&rnd=new");
// If required by the server, set the credentials.

// Get the response.
HttpWebResponse response = (HttpWebResponse)request.GetResponse ();
// Display the status.

// Get the stream containing content returned by the server.
Stream dataStream = response.GetResponseStream ();
// Open the stream using a StreamReader for easy access.
StreamReader reader = new StreamReader (dataStream);
// Read the content.
string responseFromServer = reader.ReadToEnd ();
// Display the content.
Console.WriteLine (responseFromServer);
// Cleanup the streams and the response.
reader.Close ();
dataStream.Close ();
response.Close ();

This looks very complicated, still the code is rather simple and straightforward.
Memory consumption must be much lower than with WebClient.