Question

I’ve got an action on my website that requires me to check multiple web servers and aggregate the results. Currently this is done synchronously against each web server in a foreach which can be slow depending on how responsive the web-server is.

What Id like to do is each request asynchronously and aggregate all the results when they are all complete.

My question is – with ASP.NET Webforms, what’s the best way to do this? Is there anything I should avoid?

Each request could take 2 seconds so I’d like to kick them all off at the same time.

Answer 1

This sounds like a good care for “standard” asynchronous IO or “standard” threaded IO.

Where T represents {time1, time2, ..}, this would make the response O(max(T)) instead of O(sum(T)) – assuming no sequential dependencies or other bottlenecks.

This can be done either using either

Asynchronous IO – where the IO does not block the thread

• async/await (“upcoming”)
• or using the “old” BeginX/EndX async pairs or other IAsync interfaces

or Synchronous IO, but threaded – where the IO does block an individual thread

• TPL in .NET4
• or “old manual” threading/pooling (linked post has same “requirement”)

The .NET version used and the API available to get the external data plays a factor in which approach is [more] appropriate.