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Asked: 2026-06-10T02:10:10+00:00

Question: Is there a way to force the Task Parallel Library to run multiple

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Question:

Is there a way to force the Task Parallel Library to run multiple tasks simultaneously? Even if it means making the whole process run slower with all the added context switching on each core?

Background:

I’m fairly new to multithreading, so I could use some assistance. My initial research hasn’t turned up much, but I also doubt I know what exactly to search for. Perhaps someone more experienced with multithreading can help me better understand TPL and/or find a better solution.

Our company is planning on deploying a piece of software to all users’ machines that will connect to a central server a few times a day, and synchronize some files and MS Access data back to the user’s machine. We would like to load-test this concept first and see how the Access DB holds up to lots of simultaneous connections.

I’ve been tasked with writing a .NET application that behaves like the client app (connecting & syncing with a network location), but does this on multiple threads simultaneously.

I’ve been getting familiar with the Task Parallel Library (TPL), as this seems like the best (newest) way to handle multithreading, and get return values back from each thread easily. However as I understand it, TPL decides how to run each “task” for the fastest execution possible, splitting the work among the available cores. So lets say I want to run 30 sync jobs on a 2-core machine… the TPL would run 15 on each core, sequentially. This would mean my load test would only be hitting the Access DB with at most 2 connections at the same time. I want to hit the database with lots of simultaneous connections.

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1 Answer

  1. Editorial Team

    You can force the TPL to do this by specifying TaskOptions.LongRunning. According to Reflector (not according to the docs, though) this always creates a new thread. I consider relying on this safe production use.

    Normal tasks will not do, because they don’t guarantee execution. Setting MinThreads is a horrible solution (for production) because you are changing a process global setting to solve a local problem. And still, you are not guaranteed success.

    Of course, you can also start threads. Tasks are more convenient though because of error handling. Nothing wrong with using threads for this use case.

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