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

ConcurrentBag<T>


ConcurrentBag<T> is one of the simplest concurrent collections. It is intended to store any general-purpose data. The main feature of this collection is how it stores the data; the Add method appends an item to a doubly-linked list that is stored in the current thread's local storage. This makes the appending operation very efficient, since there is no contention. Getting an item from the collection with the TryTake or TryPeek methods is also quite efficient. First, we look for the item in the local list, but if it is empty, we look for items in other threads' local lists.

This approach is called work stealing and works well when each thread contains more or less the same number of data and uses the same number of append and take operations.

Let's review an example of using the ConcurrentBag<T> data structure:

var bag = new ConcurrentBag<string>();
 
var task1 = Run(() =>
{
    AddAndPrint(bag, "[T1]: Item 1");
    AddAndPrint(bag, "[T1]: Item 2...