Question

I’ve tried to figure out whether using ThreadPools in an ASP.NET site is good or not. There’s a lot of discussion about this but difficult to find an authorative source.

I’m building a site where the user fills out a form and presses the send button, this triggers a mail to be sent. My problem is that my mail vendor’s API is quite slow (100ms to 12s) and this is not good for responsiveness of the app.

Is this a good idea?:

ThreadPool.QueueUserWorkItem(e =>
    EmailFactory.BuildBuyerEmailValidationEmail(client).Send()
);

The form is used about 100-200 times a day.

I’d like to avoid creating a queue as this would increase application complexity.

Answer 1

This looks totally fine to me. The thread pool contains 250 threads per processor, so even if this form would be submitted 50 times a minute, it would not be any problem, because then only about ten threads would be working in parallel