Asynchronous programming - .NET Way

ASYNCHRONY
I Am Bit Tricky
To Catch
 Trendy
 Examples: AJAX, AMD etc. and numerous language-
level/addon implementations
 Languages supporting async patterns:
C#:Tasks,
Java7-8: Future and CompletableFuture
Go: Routines and channels,
Erlang: Processes and spawn
Python: tasks, coroutines (asyncio)
JavaScript (ES2017-ES8): Promises
and list goes on.

ASYNCHRONY
I'll Call You Back
 Occurrence of events independent of the main
program flow
 Enables this “main program” continue its work, not
blocking to wait for event results
 Implicit degree of parallelism

BENEFITS
I Am Not Just
For UI Apps
1. Scalability and
2. Offloading (e.g. responsiveness, parallelism)
 Most client apps care about asynchrony for
“Offloading” reasons
 For store, desktop and phone apps: primary benefit is
responsiveness
 Most server apps care about asynchrony for
“Scalability” reasons
 Node.js, ASP.NET Core are inherently asynchronous,
hence scaling is their key.
Common Question: Does async have a place on the
server?

GOAL
I Am About To
Discussed More?
 History of Asynchronous APIs on .NET
 Thread,Threadpool and Task
 Conceptual overview of request handling on
ASP.NET
 I won’t be covering C# async-await API syntax

HISTORY
.Net And .Net
Languages have
Always Been
Loving Async
 APM (.NET1.1) : Socket class
 Begin<MethodName> and End<MethodName>
methods
 EAP (.NET2) : e.g. BackgroundWorker class
 <MethodName>Async methods
 Task and TPL (.NET4)
 Task-based Asynchronous Pattern (TAP) (.NET4.5)
 Async and await
 Language level support on C# and VB (2012), F#
(2010)
 TAP: Recommended asynchronous design pattern

THREAD
I Am An Action
Lady
 First appears in IBM OS/360 in 1967
 Its actual OS-level thread
 Gives life to a process
 Each process has at least one thread (Main thread)
 Threads share their address space

CLR THREAD
You should hate
new Thread()
 Freaking expensive: Memory and time overhead associated
with them
Thread =
(Thread Kernel Object) x86-700BYTE, x64-1240BYTE
+ (Thread Environment Block) x86-4KB, x64-8KB
+ (User Mode Stack) x86, x64-1MB
+ (Kernel Mode Stack) x86-12KB, x64-24KB
 CLR thread directly maps to Windows thread
 Highest degree of control that programmers don’t want 
 Only spun up new if heavy computations on multiple CPUs
needs to be done.
 Foreground and background threads

THREADPOOL
I manage threads
for you, sir!
 Thread pool is a set of threads available readily and
maintained by the CLR.
 No control but pool size: Submit work to execute,
wait for good to happen 
 Best for large no. of short operations where the
caller does not need the result.

CONTINUED…
 Threadpool size (no. of threads)
 Default minimum = No. of processors
 Default maximum = 5000 (.NET4.5)
 Thread Injection: Starvation avoidance and hill-
climbing algorithm
 Threads are added or removed every 500ms
 Thread pool categorizes its threads as
 Worker threads
 I/O completion port (IOCP) threads

IIS: REQUEST
HANDLING
Web Dev? You
Need To
Understand Me
 An app/web server
 Kernel mode and user mode (Native mode)
 App pool: Grouping of URLs that is routed to one or
more worker processes.

OLD SYNCHRONOUS
WAY
You Devs Love Me,
Don’t You?
 ASP.NET takes one of its thread pool threads and
assigns it to just arrived request
 Request handler call that external resource
synchronously and blocks it until result returns

BAD PART
All Busy,Try
Later
 Thread count saturation
 Available threads blocked and wasted
 New request have to wait and in danger of 503

ASYNCHRONOUS
WAY
Don’t Trust Me?
Try Then
 Async don’t waste precious threadpool threads
 Server could cope new request easily
 Smaller number of threads to handle a larger
number of requests.

THREADPOOL SIZE
Just Increase Me
And Forget Async
Altogether.
I Do Joke Too 
 Async does not replace the thread pool, rather
makes optimum use of it
 Scales both further and faster than blocking
threadpool threads
 Less memory pressure
 Can respond to sudden swings in request volume
Common question: What About the Thread Doing
the AsynchronousWork? There must something
monitoring at it, right?
No, not at all

TASKS
Some Call Me
FUTURES Others
PROMISES
 Best of both worlds
 TaskScheduler
 Thread Pool Task Scheduler
 Synchronization Context Task Scheduler
 Task Factories
 Task Continuation, Progress and Cancellation
 All newer high-level concurrency APIs are all built
on Task.
 Task<T> promises to return us a T saying:“not
right now honey, I'm kinda busy, why don't you
come back later? In fact, I will inform you when
I am done or you may cancel me any time you
want”

CPU-BOUND
TASK
I Love CPU,
Not You;
Leave Me
Alone
 Async Don’ts
 Too lightweight I/O (<30ms)
 CPU-Intensive Operations
 Historic problems with async:
 Asynchronous code is difficult
 Database backend is a bottleneck
 But today ( past few years )
 Bottleneck pushed back to app server

ASP.NET ASYNC
PATTERNS
Where Were
You?
As If You
Cared? Always
There, Just Bit
Shy
 In Asp.Net since very beginning
 AsynchronousWeb pages introduced in ASP.NET 2.0
 MVC got asynchronous controllers in ASP.NET MVC 2
 However, always been awkward to write and
difficult to maintain
 Now, the tables have turned
 In ASP.NET 4.5, async-await is savior
 More and more companies are embracing async
and await on ASP.NET.

ASYNC FLOW
I Yield
Control Back
To The Caller

NOT TO CONFUSE
WITH TPL
We Sound
Similar But
Inherently
Different

Asynchronous programming - .NET Way

ASYNC BEST
PRACTICES
Be Clever Else
You Are Busted

Old New Description
task.Wait await task Wait/await for a task to complete
task.Result await task Get the result of a completed task
Task.WaitAny await Task.WhenAny Wait/await for one of a collection of tasks to
complete
Task.WaitAll await Task.WhenAll Wait/await for every one of a collection of tasks to
complete
Thread.Sleep await Task.Delay Wait/await for a period of time
Task constructor Task.Run or TaskFactory.StartNew Create a code-based task

Problem Solution
Create a task to execute code
Task.Run or TaskFactory.StartNew (not the Task constructor
or Task.Start)
Create a task wrapper for an operation or event TaskFactory.FromAsync or TaskCompletionSource<T>
Support cancellation CancellationTokenSource and CancellationToken
Report progress IProgress<T> and Progress<T>
Handle streams of data TPL Dataflow or Reactive Extensions
Synchronize access to a shared resource SemaphoreSlim
Asynchronously initialize a resource AsyncLazy<T>
Async-ready producer/consumer structures TPL Dataflow or AsyncCollection<T>

REENTRANCY
Don’t Exploit Me
For God Sake
Else My Curse
Will Hurt You
 Reentering an asynchronous operation before it has
completed
 Prevent reentrancy or it can cause unexpected
results
 Disable subsequent invokes until its done
 Cancel and Restart operation
 Run multiple operations and Queue the output

FINE TUNING
Want Precision
And Flexibility
To Your Async
App? More APIs
For You
 CancellationToken, Task.WhenAll and
Task.WhenAny
 Start multiple tasks and await their completion by
monitoring a single task.
 Use cases:
 Cancel an Async Task or a List of Tasks
 Cancel Async Tasks after a Period of Time
 Cancel Remaining Async Tasks after One Is Complete
 Start Multiple Async Tasks and Process Them As They
Complete

 To understand why asynchronous requests scale, let’s trace a (simplified) example
of an asynchronous I/O call. Let’s say a request needs to write to a file.The request
thread calls the asynchronous write method.WriteAsync is implemented by the
Base Class Library (BCL), and uses completion ports for its asynchronous I/O. So,
the WriteAsync call is passed down to the OS as an asynchronous file write.The OS
then communicates with the driver stack, passing along the data to write in an I/O
request packet (IRP).
 This is where things get interesting: If a device driver can’t handle an IRP
immediately, it must handle it asynchronously. So, the driver tells the disk to start
writing and returns a “pending” response to the OS.The OS passes that “pending”
response to the BCL, and the BCL returns an incomplete task to the request-
handling code.The request-handling code awaits the task, which returns an
incomplete task from that method and so on. Finally, the request-handling code
ends up returning an incomplete task to ASP.NET, and the request thread is freed
to return to the thread pool.

 Now, consider the current state of the system.There are various I/O structures that
have been allocated (for example, the Task instances and the IRP), and they’re all
in a pending/incomplete state. However, there’s no thread that is blocked waiting
for that write operation to complete. Neither ASP.NET, nor the BCL, nor the OS, nor
the device driver has a thread dedicated to the asynchronous work.
 When the disk completes writing the data, it notifies its driver via an interrupt.The
driver informs the OS that the IRP has completed, and the OS notifies the BCL via
the completion port. A thread pool thread responds to that notification by
completing the task that was returned from WriteAsync(); this in turn resumes the
asynchronous request code.
 Yes, there were a few threads “borrowed” for very short amounts of time during
this completion-notification phase, but no thread was actually blocked while the
write was in progress.

 Above example is drastically simplified, but it gets across the primary point: no
thread is required for true asynchronous work. No CPU time is necessary to
actually push the bytes out.
 At the device driver level, all non-trivial I/O is asynchronous. Many developers
have a mental model that treats the “natural API” for I/O operations as
synchronous, with the asynchronous API as a layer built on it. However, that’s
completely backward: in fact, the natural API is asynchronous; and it’s the
synchronous APIs that are implemented using asynchronous I/O.

Asynchronous programming - .NET Way

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