Is multithreading an API application a thing?-CodePudding

I'm learning C#/DOTNET as one of the main reasons are incredible speeds over Node.js and OO syntax.

Now the tutorial I am following all of a sudden introduced async, and that's cool, but I could have done that with Node.js as well, so I feel a little disappointed.

My thought was maybe we could take this to the next level with Multithreading, but a lot of questions came up, with discrepancy in the database (like thread one is expecting to get data that thread two updated, but thread two was not executed before thread one retrieved, so thread one is working with an outdated data).

And searching for this seems to return very little information, mostly it's people misunderstanding multithreading and asynchronous programing.

So I'm guessing you would not want to mix API with multithreading?

CodePudding user response：

Async await is used for multi-threading but it is not used only for multi-threading.

I have not pesronally used/seen multi-threading in API but only console jobs. Using TPL in console jobs has improved the efficiency more than 100% for me

Async/Await is powerful and should be used for asynchronic processing in API's too.

Please go through Shiv's videos https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iMcycFie-nk

CodePudding user response：

Yes, it's a thing, and you're already doing it with async tasks.

.NET has a Task Scheduler that assigns your tasks to available threads from the Thread Pool. Default behavior is to create a pool of threads for each available CPU.

From the perspective of a regular async method, it can be hard to see where the 'multi-threading' comes into play. There isn't an obvious difference between Get() and await GetAsync() when your code has to sit and wait either way.

But it's not always about your code. This example might make it more clear.

List<Task> work = new();
foreach(var uri in uriList)
{
    work.Add(http.GetAsync(uri));
}
await Task.WhenAll(work);

This code will execute all those GetAsyncs at the same time.

The framework making your API work is doing something similar. It would be pretty silly if the whole server was tied up because a single user requested a big file over dialup.