C# task vs synchronous

Question

0.00/5 (No votes)

See more:

Hey there!

Quick question - recently I been working on an older project where every method is of type Task<t> and 95% of the stuff is synchronous. Meaning it always waits for the task to complete before going further. So - is there any benefit of having that instead just converting the method to synchronous and removing the "await" keyword?

Cheers!

What I have tried:

google stuff, msdn stuff, whatever

Posted 24-May-20 20:44pm

MK-Gii

Updated 24-May-20 21:55pm

Add a Solution

1 solution

Add a Solution

Add your solution here

Treat my content as plain text, not as HTML

Preview 0

…

Existing Members

Sign in to your account

...or Join us

Download, Vote, Comment, Publish.

Your Email
Password
Forgot your password?

Your Email
This email is in use. Do you need your password?
Optional Password

I have read and agree to the Terms of Service and Privacy Policy
Please subscribe me to the CodeProject newsletters

When answering a question please:

Read the question carefully.
Understand that English isn't everyone's first language so be lenient of bad spelling and grammar.
If a question is poorly phrased then either ask for clarification, ignore it, or edit the question and fix the problem. Insults are not welcome.
Don't tell someone to read the manual. Chances are they have and don't get it. Provide an answer or move on to the next question.

Let's work to help developers, not make them feel stupid.

This content, along with any associated source code and files, is licensed under The Code Project Open License (CPOL)

RickZeeland · Accepted Answer · 2020-05-24T21:56:00

Solution 1

When using Tasks you could use a loop and check if the Task .IsCompleted in the loop, this way you don't have to wait.
Task.IsCompleted Property (System.Threading.Tasks) | Microsoft Docs[^]

I used this in a Windows service without any Async statements and about 20 simultaneous running Tasks (including long running tasks) for monitoring all kinds of things, and it works without any problems.

There is a nice series of articles on CodeProject about Tasks: Task Parallel Library: 1 of n[^]

Posted 24-May-20 21:56pm

RickZeeland

Updated 24-May-20 22:25pm

v3

Comments

MK-Gii 25-May-20 6:06am

But in general - is there any benefit is using TPL for purely synchronous flows?

RickZeeland 25-May-20 6:26am

Probably not if all tasks must be handled sequentially ... if you are using an UI like winforms however it can be useful to keep the UI responsive.

MK-Gii 25-May-20 7:14am

In my case it was just a web API, where calls to db to get something from it was made async and then waiting each time for the data before going further. So the API consumer still has to wait same amount of time and I need to make sure not to forget to await each time I try get something from db.

Richard Deeming 27-May-20 15:43pm

If the code is actually async - in this case, it sounds like it's IO-bound - then there is a benefit.

Rather than having the calling thread "freeze" until the IO-bound operation has completed, the work it was doing can be suspended and the thread can be returned to the pool and used to process other tasks. When the operation has completed, a free thread can then be obtained to continue with the work.

Think of it like the difference between having the kids in the back of the car shouting "Are we nearly there yet? Are we nearly there yet?" over and over again for the entire journey, and having them sat quietly looking at their phones until you tell them you've arrived. :)

RickZeeland 27-May-20 16:17pm

Haha, nice comparison, now over to the launch of SpaceX !

honey the codewitch 4-Aug-20 11:31am

If you are writing web server code keep everything synchronous! ASP.NET is not designed for async. The page lifecycle runs beginning to end, so all processing must be done sequentially for the page to render anyway. All you'd be doing is messing up ASP.NET's thread pool heuristics since it's not designed for this. Better to not use Task at all. Hope this helps!