Question 1.
Is using Parallel.For and Parallel.ForEach better suited to working with tasks that are ordered or unordered?
My reason for asking is that I recently updated a serial loop where a StringBuilder was being used to generate a SQL statement based on various parameters. The result was that the SQL was a bit jumbled up (to the point it contained syntax errors) in comparison to when using a standard foreach loop, therefore my gut feeling is that TPL is not suited to performing tasks where the data must appear in a particular order.
Question 2.
Does the TPL automatically make use of multicore architectures of must I provision anything prior to execution?
My reason for asking this relates back to an eariler question I asked relating to performance profiling of TPL operations. An answer to the question enlightened me to the fact that TPL is not always more efficient than a standard serial loop as the application may not have access to multiple cores, and therefore the overhead of creating additional threads and loops would create a performance decrease in comparison to a standard serial loop.
my gut feeling is that TPL is not suited to performing tasks where the data must appear in a particular order.
Correct. If you expect things in order, you might have a misunderstanding about what’s going to happen when you “parallelize” a loop.
Does the TPL automatically make use of multicore architectures of must I provision anything prior to execution?
See the following article on the msdn magazine:
http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/magazine/cc163340.aspx