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

Real and fake asynchronous I/O operations


So far, an asynchronous I/O seems to be a good thing for server applications. Unfortunately, there is quite unexpected underwater stone that is very hard to find. Let's look at the following code. It happens that the FileStream instance has the IsAsync property, indicating that the underlying I/O operation is asynchronous. We will start a few asynchronous writes and check whether they are really asynchronous:

private const int BUFFER_SIZE = 4096;

private static async Task ProcessAsynchronousIO()
{
  using (var stream = new FileStream("test1.txt", FileMode.Create, FileAccess.ReadWrite, FileShare.None, BUFFER_SIZE))
  {
    Console.WriteLine("1. Uses I/O Threads: {0}", stream.IsAsync);

    var buffer = Encoding.UTF8.GetBytes(CreateFileContent());
    var t = stream.WriteAsync(buffer, 0, buffer.Length);
    await t;
  }

  using (var stream = new FileStream("test2.txt", FileMode.Create, FileAccess.ReadWrite, FileShare.None, BUFFER_SIZE, FileOptions...