Question

I’m writing a network-bound application based on await/sleep paradigm.

Sometimes, connection errors happen, and in my experience it pays to wait for some time and then retry operation again.

The problem is that if I use Thread.Sleep or another similar blocking operation in await/async, it blocks all activity in the caller thread.

What should I replace Thread.Sleep(10000) with to achieve the same effect as

await Thread.SleepAsync(10000)

?

UPDATE

I’ll prefer an answer which does this without creating any additional thread

Answer 1

The other answers suggesting starting a new thread are a bad idea – there’s no need to do that at all. Part of the point of async/await is to reduce the number of threads your application needs.

You should instead use Task.Delay which doesn’t require a new thread, and was designed precisely for this purpose:

// Execution of the async method will continue one second later, but without
// blocking.
await Task.Delay(1000);

This solution also has the advantage of allowing cancellation, if a cancellation token is provided. Example:

public async Task DoWork(CancellationToken token)
{
    await Task.Delay(1000, token);
}