How to introduce a delay between webrequests to a site in C#?

Question

I making making multiple requests to a website. How can I introduce a delay between requests to slow down my process? Is there a method that allows me to just cause the thread to just wait for X seconds before proceeding?

Answer 1

Are you looking for Thread.Sleep?

Note that it causes the current thread to sleep - you don't target it at a different thread. But if you've got a loop within one thread, making multiple requests, you could easily add it in to the loop to restrict your request rate.

The Sleep method is overloaded - one signature takes a TimeSpan and the other takes a number of milliseconds. Personally I'd generally prefer the first one, as it leaves no room for ambiguity. For example:

Thread.Sleep(TimeSpan.FromSeconds(2));

is obviously asking the thread to sleep for 2 seconds - not 2 minutes, 2 milliseconds etc.

Answer 2

System.Threading.Thread.Sleep(x);

…where x is the number of milliseconds to sleep the thread.

An alternative is to use a Timer and do a request each time the Tick event fires.