Book Image

Mastering C# Concurrency

Book Image

Mastering C# Concurrency

Overview of this book

Starting with the traditional approach to concurrency, you will learn how to write multithreaded concurrent programs and compose ways that won't require locking. You will explore the concepts of parallelism granularity, and fine-grained and coarse-grained parallel tasks by choosing a concurrent program structure and parallelizing the workload optimally. You will also learn how to use task parallel library, cancellations, timeouts, and how to handle errors. You will know how to choose the appropriate data structure for a specific parallel algorithm to achieve scalability and performance. Further, you'll learn about server scalability, asynchronous I/O, and thread pools, and write responsive traditional Windows and Windows Store applications. By the end of the book, you will be able to diagnose and resolve typical problems that could happen in multithreaded applications.
Table of Contents (17 chapters)
Mastering C# Concurrency
Credits
About the Authors
About the Reviewers
www.PacktPub.com
Preface
Index

Choosing the coarse-grained or fine-grained approach


Fine-grained parallelism granularity allows us to run heterogeneous computational tasks effectively. Besides this, the fine-grained approach makes the splitting of your program into tasks easier, especially if these tasks are related to each other and, for example, latter tasks use some computation results of former tasks. However, we will have to trade off some performance, since the CPU has to be used to manage all these tasks as well.

To find out how fine-grained granularity can affect performance for a real task, let's implement a ray tracing algorithm using TPL and compare it to the results that we got in the beginning using an optimal number of threads. To implement the fine-grained program version, we will just create a task for each image column and start it immediately. The implementation code is as follows:

var tasks = new List<Task>();
var fineSw = Stopwatch.StartNew();
for (var i = 0; i < _width; i++)
{
  var col = i...