HttpContent.ReadAsStringAsync causes request to hang (or other strange behaviours)

Question

We are building a highly concurrent web application, and recently we have started using asynchronous programming extensively (using TPL and async/await).

We have a distributed environment, in which apps communicate with each other through REST APIs (built on top of ASP.NET Web API). In one specific app, we have a DelegatingHandler that after calling base.SendAsync (i.e., after calculating the response) logs the response to a file. We include the response's basic information in the log (status code, headers and content):

public static string SerializeResponse(HttpResponseMessage response)
{
    var builder = new StringBuilder();
    var content = ReadContentAsString(response.Content);

    builder.AppendFormat("HTTP/{0} {1:d} {1}", response.Version.ToString(2), response.StatusCode);
    builder.AppendLine();
    builder.Append(response.Headers);

    if (!string.IsNullOrWhiteSpace(content))
    {
        builder.Append(response.Content.Headers);

        builder.AppendLine();
        builder.AppendLine(Beautified(content));
    }

    return builder.ToString();
}

private static string ReadContentAsString(HttpContent content)
{
    return content == null ? null : content.ReadAsStringAsync().Result;
}

The problem is this: when the code reaches content.ReadAsStringAsync().Result under heavy server load, the request sometimes hangs on IIS. When it does, it sometimes returns a response -- but hangs on IIS as if it didn't -- or in other times it never returns.

I have also tried reading the content using ReadAsByteArrayAsync and then converting it to String, with no luck.

When I convert the code to use async throughout I get even weirder results:

public static async Task<string> SerializeResponseAsync(HttpResponseMessage response)
{
    var builder = new StringBuilder();
    var content = await ReadContentAsStringAsync(response.Content);

    builder.AppendFormat("HTTP/{0} {1:d} {1}", response.Version.ToString(2), response.StatusCode);
    builder.AppendLine();
    builder.Append(response.Headers);

    if (!string.IsNullOrWhiteSpace(content))
    {
        builder.Append(response.Content.Headers);

        builder.AppendLine();
        builder.AppendLine(Beautified(content));
    }

    return builder.ToString();
}

private static Task<string> ReadContentAsStringAsync(HttpContent content)
{
    return content == null ? Task.FromResult<string>(null) : content.ReadAsStringAsync();
}

Now HttpContext.Current is null after the call to content.ReadAsStringAsync(), and it keeps being null for all the subsequent requests! I know this sounds unbelievable -- and it took me some time and the presence of three coworkers to accept that this was really happening.

Is this some kind of expected behavior? Am I doing something wrong here?

Answer 1

With regards to your second issue, the async/await is syntactic sugar for the compiler building a state machine where the call to to a function preceded by "await" returns immediately on the current thread...one that contains HttpContext.Current in its thread local storage. The completion of that async call can occur on a different thread...one that does NOT have HttpContext.Current in its thread local storage.

If you want the completion to execute on the same thread (thus having the same objects in thread local storage like HttpContext.Current), then you need to be aware of this behavior. This is especially important on calls from the main UI thread (if you're building a Windows application) or in ASP.NET, calls from an ASP.NET request thread where you are dependent on HttpContext.Current.

See reference docs on ConfigureAwait(false). Also, view some Channel 9 tutorials on TPL. Once the "easy" stuff is grokked, the presenter will invariably talk about this issue as it causes subtle problems that are not easily understood unless you know what the TPL is doing underneath the covers.

Good luck.

With regards to your first problem, if the caller gets a result, I'm not convinced that IIS has not completed the request. How are you determining that the ASP.NET request thread initiated by this caller is hung in IIS?

Answer 2

I had this problem. Although, I haven't fully tested yet, using CopyToAsync instead of ReadAsStringAsync seems to fix the problem:

var ms = new MemoryStream();
await response.Content.CopyToAsync(ms);
ms.Seek(0, SeekOrigin.Begin);

var sr = new StreamReader(ms);
responseContent = sr.ReadToEnd();