C# 3.0 in a Nutshell, 3rd Edition

Chapter 20. Asynchronous Methods

In Chapter 19, we saw how a thread provides a parallel execution path. We took for granted that whenever you needed to run something in parallel, you could assign a new or pooled thread to the job. Although this usually holds true, there are exceptions. Suppose you were writing a TCP sockets or web server application that needed to process 1,000 concurrent requests. If you dedicated a thread to each incoming request, you would consume a gigabyte of memory purely on thread overhead.

Asynchronous methods address this problem through a pattern by which many concurrent activities are handled by a few pooled threads. This makes it possible to write highly concurrent applications—as well as highly thread-efficient applications.

To avoid getting lost, you’ll need to be familiar with threading (Chapter 19) and streams (Chapter 13).

Why Asynchronous Methods Exist

The problem just described might be insoluble if every thread needed to be busy all of the time. But this is not the case: fetching a web page, for instance, might take up to several seconds from start to end (because of a potentially slow connection) and yet consume only a fraction of a millisecond of CPU time in total. Processing an HTTP request is not computationally intensive.

This means that a thread dedicated to processing a single web request might spend 99 percent of its time blocked—representing huge economy potential. The asynchronous method pattern exploits just this potential, allowing a handful ...