Question

I’ve got a Windows service that monitors a table (with a timer) for rows, grabs rows one at a time when they appear, submits the information to a RESTful web service, analyzes the response, and writes some details about the response to a table. Would I gain anything by making this async? My current (stripped down) web service submission code is as follows:

HttpWebRequest req = (HttpWebRequest)HttpWebRequest.Create(new Uri(url));
HttpWebResponse resp;
try
{
      resp = (HttpWebResponse)req.GetResponse();
}
catch (WebException we)
{
      resp = (HttpWebResponse)we.Response;
}

if (resp != null)
{
      Stream respStream = resp.GetResponseStream();
      if (respStream != null)
      {
           responseBody = new StreamReader(respStream).ReadToEnd();
      }

      resp.Close();
      respStream.Close();
}

return responseBody;

Answer 1

If you don’t care how long it takes to get your response for any individual request, no, there’s no particular reason to make it async.

On the other hand, if you’re waiting for one request to fully finish before you start your next request you might have trouble handling a large volume. In this scenario you might want to look at parallelizing your code. But that’s only worth discussing if you get large numbers of items entered into the database for processing.