How does AsyncController avoid using an ASP.NET worker thread?

Question

How exactly does AsyncController avoid using an ASP.NET worker thread? If I use the event-based pattern (pseudo-code):

[AsyncTimeout(60000)]
public void WaitForWakeUp() 
{
    AsyncManager.OutstandingOperations.Increase();
    EventRaisedElsewhere += 
    state => 
    {
        AsyncManager.OutstandingOperations.Decrease();
        return Content("Woke up because of " + state);
    };
}

...then according to Clay Lenharts it doesn't use an ASP.NET worker thread. How is this possible?

I looked a bit into the AsyncController source code but didn't understand anything, except that it uses IAsyncResult alot and does QueueUserWorkItem in some places.

But how can BeginInvoke and QueueUserWorkItem not use an ASP.NET worker thread? Surely both of these use a thread pool thread, and surely there is only one thread pool in an ASP.NET worker process?

According to MSDN,

The Web server gets a thread from the thread pool (the worker thread) and schedules it to handle an incoming request. This worker thread initiates an asynchronous operation.

The worker thread is returned to the thread pool to service another Web request.

When the asynchronous operation is complete, it notifies ASP.NET.

But for anything non-trivial, it sounds like initiates an asynchronous operation will still require a thread to run on. Only in extremely simple cases (like using the BCL to download web content) will it be completely unwound and/or completely IOCP bound, right?

I'm asking partly because I see all these Chat Servers implemented using AsyncController and if all they do is "wait for new messages" I don't understand how that can be done on a non-threadpool thread.

Simon Halsey · Answer 1 · 2011-08-03T15:01:30.550

You are sort of correct. It does use a asp.net thread to initiate the async call, but that thread gets finished with & returned to the pool. The async process then runs on another thread from the the worker thread pool before notifying asp.net it need a thread to deal with the result.

it's more efficient because the asp.net thread pool limits incoming connections, so freeing these up as soon as possible allows you to deal with more incoming connections quicker.

At least that's how I see it.

Edit I don't think that's entirely true. There is is only one background thread pool, as defined in the framework, but you can create as many other threads as you like and create your own thread pool, distinct from the background thread pool.

I believe that's what's happening here. There is a small number of worker threads dealing with requests. These worker threads spawn threads in the background pool to deal with the async requests.

Simon

sorry, this is too vague. The w3wp worker process has exactly one CLR thread pool, doesn't it? So what thread pool are you referring to by "the the worker thread pool" above? Is this the same thread pool as the thread pool from which threads are pulled to serve incoming http requests? In that case, why does returning the action method invoker thread to that thread pool, and then immediately pulling a new one, make anything quicker? Also, if the thread is returned to the thread pool, how is the "waiting" achieved? — clonedog, Aug 03 '11 at 08:31

How does AsyncController avoid using an ASP.NET worker thread?

1 Answers1