Is it worth using PLINQ with ASP.NET?

Question

Does anyone have experience using PLINQ with ASP.NET? Is this a good combination, or something to avoid in most situations?

I develop an intranet ASP.NET site for a lawfirm (~100 users). Several pages include non-trivial LINQ code, for example, we have a bank rec page that compares thousands of financial transactions between our accounting database and the bank's data, using LINQ to Datasets. This is slow, so I am tempted to try PLINQ, but I am worried this could lead to 1 request monopolizing the web server. Having the bank rec run 4 times faster but shutting all other users out while it is running would not be an improvement.

I know there are much faster solutions than LINQ, but I would rather have short code to maintain.

Right now, we have a Dual Pentium 4 web server, but I am hoping we can upgrade to decent hardware in the near future.

Answer 1

Just from what I've heard, there are only a few cases where PLINQ is slower than LINQ. I hadn't heard any cases where PLINQ monopolized things as you described. Microsoft has a session at PDC09 PLINQ: LINQ, but Faster!. I hope this video will help you decide if PLINQ is right for you, but as they say, measure before and after. Good luck.

Answer 2

I have a similar concern. I'm assuming plinq uses a backgroud thread from the thread pool, if this is the case then it would impact scalability of the site. You get by default 100 threads per cpu if you have a low used site you might want to burn some extra threads per user request, but I'd do so very cautiously