A few things I have observed regarding Parallel.ForEach
and dealing with Azure Storage (my experience has been with uploading blobs/blocks in parallel):
- Azure storage operations are Network (IO) based operations and not processor intensive operations. If I am not mistaken,
Parallel.ForEach
is more suitable for processor intensive applications. - Another thing we noticed with uploading a large number of blobs (or blocks) using
Parallel.ForEach
is that we started to get a lot ofTimeout
exceptions and actually slowed down the entire operation. I believe the reason for this is when you iterate over a collection with large number of items using this approach, you're essentially handling the control to underlying framework which decides how to deal with that collection. In this case, a lot ofContext Switching
will take place which slows down the operation. Not sure how this would work in your scenario considering the payload is smaller.
My recommendation would be have the application control the number of parallel threads it can spawn. A good criteria would be the number of logical processor. Another good criteria would be the number of ports IE can open. So you would spawn that many number of parallel threads. Then you could either wait for all threads to finish to spawn next set of parallel threads or start a new thread as soon as one task finishes.
Pseudo Code:
ICollection<string> messageContents;
private void AddMessages()
{
int maxParallelThreads = Math.Min(Environment.ProcessorCount, messageContents.Count);
if (maxParallelThreads > 0)
{
var itemsToAdd = messageContents.Take(maxParallelThreads);
List<Task> tasks = new List<Task>();
for (var i = 0; i < maxParallelThreads; i++)
{
tasks.Add(Task.Factory.StartNew(() =>
{
AddMessage(itemsToAdd[i]);
RemoveItemFromCollection();
}));
}
Task.WaitAll(tasks.ToArray());
AddMessages();
}
}