Optimizing for fire & forget using async/await and tasks

Question

I have about 5 million items to update. I don't really care about the response (A response would be nice to have so I can log it, but I don't want a response if that will cost me time.) Having said that, is this code optimized to run as fast as possible? If there are 5 million items, would I run the risk of getting any task cancelled or timeout errors? I get about 1 or 2 responses back every second.

var tasks = items.Select(async item =>
{
    await Update(CreateUrl(item));
}).ToList();

if (tasks.Any())
{
    await Task.WhenAll(tasks);
}                

private async Task<HttpResponseMessage> Update(string url)
{
    var client = new HttpClient();
    var response = await client.SendAsync(url).ConfigureAwait(false);    
    //log response.
}

UPDATE: I am actually getting TaskCanceledExceptions. Did my system run out of threads? What could I do to avoid this?

Answer 1

You method will kick off all tasks at the same time, which may not be what you want. There wouldn't be any threads involved because with async operations There is no thread, but there may be number of concurrent connection limits.

There may be better tools to do this but if you want to use async/await one option is to use Stephen Toub's ForEachAsync as documented in this article. It allows you to control how many simultaneous operations you want to execute, so you don't overrun your connection limit.

Here it is from the article:

public static class Extensions
{
     public static async Task ExecuteInPartition<T>(IEnumerator<T> partition, Func<T, Task> body)
     {
         using (partition)
             while (partition.MoveNext())
                await body(partition.Current);
     }

     public static Task ForEachAsync<T>(this IEnumerable<T> source, int dop, Func<T, Task> body)
     {      
         return Task.WhenAll(
             from partition in Partitioner.Create(source).GetPartitions(dop)
                  select ExecuteInPartition(partition, body));
     }
}

Usage:

public async Task UpdateAll()
{
    // Allow for 100 concurrent Updates
    await items.ForEachAsync(100, async t => await Update(t));  
}