Using ThreadPool.QueueUserWorkItem in ASP.NET in a high traffic scenario

user_58173 0
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I've always been under the impression that using the ThreadPool for (let's say non-critical) short-lived background tasks was considered best practice, even in ASP.NET, but then I came across this article that seems to suggest otherwise - the argument being that you should leave the ThreadPool to deal with ASP.NET related requests.

So here's how I've been doing small asynchronous tasks so far:

ThreadPool.QueueUserWorkItem(s => PostLog(logEvent))

And the article is suggesting instead to create a thread explicitly, similar to:

new Thread(() => PostLog(logEvent)){ IsBackground = true }.Start()

The first method has the advantage of being managed and bounded, but there's the potential (if the article is correct) that the background tasks are then vying for threads with ASP.NET request-handlers. The second method frees up the ThreadPool, but at the cost of being unbounded and thus potentially using up too many resources.

So my question is, is the advice in the article correct?

If your site was getting so much traffic that your ThreadPool was getting full, then is it better to go out-of-band, or would a full ThreadPool imply that you're getting to the limit of your resources anyway, in which case you shouldn't be trying to start your own threads?

Clarification: I'm just asking in the scope of small non-critical asynchronous tasks (eg, remote logging), not expensive work items that would require a separate process (in these cases I agree you'll need a more robust solution).

threadpool multithreading asp.net
11 Answers

You can use Parallel.For or Parallel.ForEach and define the limit of possible threads you want to allocate to run smoothly and prevent pool starvation.

However, being run in background you will need to use pure TPL style below in ASP.Net web application.

var ts = new CancellationTokenSource();
CancellationToken ct = ts.Token;

ParallelOptions po = new ParallelOptions();
            po.CancellationToken = ts.Token;
            po.MaxDegreeOfParallelism = 6; //limit here

 Task.Factory.StartNew(()=>
                {                        
                  Parallel.ForEach(collectionList, po, (collectionItem) =>
                  {
                     //Code Here PostLog(logEvent);
                  }
                });
user_21593800

I do not agree with the referenced article(C#feeds.com). It is easy to create a new thread but dangerous. The optimal number of active threads to run on a single core is actually surprisingly low - less than 10. It is way too easy to cause the machine to waste time switching threads if threads are created for minor tasks. Threads are a resource that REQUIRE management. The WorkItem abstraction is there to handle this.

There is a trade off here between reducing the number of threads available for requests and creating too many threads to allow any of them to process efficiently. This is a very dynamic situation but I think one that should be actively managed (in this case by the thread pool) rather than leaving it to the processer to stay ahead of the creation of threads.

Finally the article makes some pretty sweeping statements about the dangers of using the ThreadPool but it really needs something concrete to back them up.

Timbo_43100

Whether or not IIS uses the same ThreadPool to handle incoming requests seems hard to get a definitive answer to, and also seems to have changed over versions. So it would seem like a good idea not to use ThreadPool threads excessively, so that IIS has a lot of them available. On the other hand, spawning your own thread for every little task seems like a bad idea. Presumably, you have some sort of locking in your logging, so only one thread could progress at a time, and the rest would just take turns getting scheduled and unscheduled (not to mention the overhead of spawning a new thread). Essentially, you run into the exact problems the ThreadPool was designed to avoid.

It seems that a reasonable compromise would be for your app to allocate a single logging thread that you could pass messages to. You would want to be careful that sending messages is as fast as possible so that you don't slow down your app.

user_105580
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