Nesting await in Parallel.ForEach

Question

In a metro app, I need to execute a number of WCF calls. There are a significant number of calls to be made, so I need to do them in a parallel loop. The problem is that th

Answer 1

Using DataFlow as svick suggested may be overkill, and Stephen's answer does not provide the means to control the concurrency of the operation. However, that can be achieved rather simply:

public static async Task RunWithMaxDegreeOfConcurrency<T>(
     int maxDegreeOfConcurrency, IEnumerable<T> collection, Func<T, Task> taskFactory)
{
    var activeTasks = new List<Task>(maxDegreeOfConcurrency);
    foreach (var task in collection.Select(taskFactory))
    {
        activeTasks.Add(task);
        if (activeTasks.Count == maxDegreeOfConcurrency)
        {
            await Task.WhenAny(activeTasks.ToArray());
            //observe exceptions here
            activeTasks.RemoveAll(t => t.IsCompleted); 
        }
    }
    await Task.WhenAll(activeTasks.ToArray()).ContinueWith(t => 
    {
        //observe exceptions in a manner consistent with the above   
    });
}

The ToArray() calls can be optimized by using an array instead of a list and replacing completed tasks, but I doubt it would make much of a difference in most scenarios. Sample usage per the OP's question:

RunWithMaxDegreeOfConcurrency(10, ids, async i =>
{
    ICustomerRepo repo = new CustomerRepo();
    var cust = await repo.GetCustomer(i);
    customers.Add(cust);
});

EDIT Fellow SO user and TPL wiz Eli Arbel pointed me to a related article from Stephen Toub. As usual, his implementation is both elegant and efficient:

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 Task.Run(async delegate { 
            using (partition) 
                while (partition.MoveNext()) 
                    await body(partition.Current).ContinueWith(t => 
                          {
                              //observe exceptions
                          });

        })); 
}

Answer 2

You can save effort with the new AsyncEnumerator NuGet Package, which didn't exist 4 years ago when the question was originally posted. It allows you to control the degree of parallelism:

using System.Collections.Async;
...

await ids.ParallelForEachAsync(async i =>
{
    ICustomerRepo repo = new CustomerRepo();
    var cust = await repo.GetCustomer(i);
    customers.Add(cust);
},
maxDegreeOfParallelism: 10);

Disclaimer: I'm the author of the AsyncEnumerator library, which is open source and licensed under MIT, and I'm posting this message just to help the community.

Answer 3

I am a little late to party but you may want to consider using GetAwaiter.GetResult() to run your async code in sync context but as paralled as below;

 Parallel.ForEach(ids, i =>
{
    ICustomerRepo repo = new CustomerRepo();
    // Run this in thread which Parallel library occupied.
    var cust = repo.GetCustomer(i).GetAwaiter().GetResult();
    customers.Add(cust);
});