Question

I’ve got a single statement running on a ASP.NET page that takes a long time (by long I mean 100ms, which is too long if I want this page to be lightning fast) , and I don’t care when it executes as long as executes.

What is the best (and hopefully easiest) way to accomplish this?

Answer 1

The easiest way is probably to get it to execute in the threadpool. For example, to make this asynchronous:

using System;
using System.Threading;

class Test
{
    static void ExecuteLongRunningTask()
    {
        Console.WriteLine("Sleeping...");
        Thread.Sleep(1000);
        Console.WriteLine("... done");
    }

    static void Main()
    {
        ExecuteLongRunningTask();
        Console.WriteLine("Finished");
        Console.ReadLine();
    }
}

Change the first line of Main to:

ThreadPool.QueueUserWorkItem(x => ExecuteLongRunningTask());

Be aware that if you pass any arguments in, they’ll be captured variables – that could have subtle side-effects in some cases (particularly if you use it in a loop).