Understanding Concurrency in C#

I was several times asked about “Concurrency”, ”Asynchronous programming”, “Parallel programming”, ”CPU bound and I/O bound operations”, and "Multithreading” in the interview processes.

I think these topics are one of the most important topics and compared with other topics, they are the hardest topics to learn and explain.

In this series of tutorials, I’m going to explain all the things you need to know about Concurrency and its subtypes. Well, let's dig in.

What is Concurrency?

Concurrency is “doing more than one work at a given time”. While one operation is running, it should be possible for us to do another operation. In general, there is one operation that is running, and meanwhile application is “responsible” enough to allow us to work on another task.

Concurrency is crucial for improving responsiveness and performance in modern applications, especially those dealing with I/O-bound operations or user interactions.

The behind-the-scenes logic for the above diagram is: “While finishing the first request, respond to the second request.” That is what concurrency looks like.

Let's take one simple example.

While uploading to the server, we can get a response from the database.

CPU-bound and I/O-bound operations

Before diving into details, we need to understand the terminology to explore Concurrency better.

One of the terminologies is CPU-bound and I/O-bound operations.

CPU-Bound Operations

Characteristics

1. Consume significant CPU resources for calculations and processing.
2. They spend most of their time actively using the CPU.
3. Typically involves complex algorithms, data processing, mathematical computations, or cryptography.

Examples

• Image processing
• Data compression
• Matrix computations
• Scientific simulations
• Password hashing

Handling Techniques

• Parallelism: Distribute work across multiple CPU cores using the Task Parallel Library (TPL) and techniques like Parallel.For and Parallel.ForEach.
• Thread pools: Use thread pools to manage multiple threads efficiently, avoiding the overhead of creating and destroying threads for each operation.

class Program
{
    static void Main(string[] args)
    {
        Stopwatch stopwatch = Stopwatch.StartNew();

        // Simulate a CPU-intensive calculation using Parallel.ForEach
        Parallel.ForEach(Enumerable.Range(1, 100000), index =>
        {
            // Perform a computationally expensive task
            Math.Pow(index, index) * Math.Sin(index);
        });

        stopwatch.Stop();
        Console.WriteLine($"Total time elapsed: {stopwatch.ElapsedMilliseconds} milliseconds");
    }
}

I/O-Bound Operations

Characteristics

1. Spend most of their time waiting for input/output operations to complete.
2. Involve interactions with external resources like databases, file systems, networks, or user input.
3. CPU usage is relatively low during these wait periods.

Examples

• Reading/writing files
• Making network calls
• Accessing databases
• Handling user input

Handling Techniques

• Asynchronous programming: Use async and await keywords to enable non-blocking operations, allowing other code to execute while waiting for I/O.
• Asynchronous I/O APIs: Leverage I/O-bound APIs that support asynchronous operations, such as HttpClient for network requests or FileStream for file I/O.

using System;
using System.Net.Http;
using System.Threading.Tasks;

namespace IOBoundExample
{
    class Program
    {
        static async Task Main(string[] args)
        {
            try
            {
                Stopwatch stopwatch = Stopwatch.StartNew();

                // Asynchronously download multiple files using HttpClient
                await Task.WhenAll(new[]
                {
                    DownloadFileAsync("https://example.com/file1.txt"),
                    DownloadFileAsync("https://example.com/file2.jpg"),
                    DownloadFileAsync("https://example.com/file3.pdf")
                });

                stopwatch.Stop();
                Console.WriteLine($"Total time elapsed: {stopwatch.ElapsedMilliseconds} milliseconds");
            }
            catch (Exception ex)
            {
                Console.WriteLine("Error occurred: {0}", ex.Message);
            }
        }

        static async Task DownloadFileAsync(string url)
        {
            using (HttpClient client = new HttpClient())
            {
                using (HttpResponseMessage response = await client.GetAsync(url))
                {
                    if (response.IsSuccessStatusCode)
                    {
                        using (Stream stream = await response.Content.ReadAsStreamAsync())
                        {
                            // Simulate file processing or saving
                            await ProcessFileAsync(stream);
                        }
                    }
                    else
                    {
                        Console.WriteLine($"Failed to download {url}: {response.StatusCode}");
                    }
                }
            }
        }

        static async Task ProcessFileAsync(Stream stream)
        {
            // Simulate file processing logic here
            await Task.Delay(500); // Simulate processing time
        }
    }
}

Want to get best practices?

1. Choose appropriate techniques based on operation type: Use parallelism for CPU-bound tasks and async/await for I/O-bound tasks.
2. Avoid blocking the main thread: Use async/await or background threads to prevent UI responsiveness issues.
3. Measure and profile: Use profiling tools to identify performance bottlenecks and determine the best optimization strategies.
4. Understand the underlying hardware: Consider the number of CPU cores and I/O capabilities of the system when choosing techniques.
5. Design for concurrency: Structure code with concurrency in mind to avoid race conditions and deadlocks.
6. Use appropriate synchronization mechanisms: Protect shared resources with locks, mutexes, or other synchronization constructs.

Ok, then what is the relation between CPU-bound, I/O-bound operations with Concurrency?

All these types of operations (CPU bound and I/O bound) together create the world of concurrency. It doesn’t matter if it is CPU intensive or I/O relying operation. They are concurrency by their nature.

This was just an introduction. Starting from the next article, we’re going to the implementation forms of Concurrency in C#.