Parallel Calls to External WCF Service - ASP.NET Web Api

Question

I have come across a situation where I feel running some code in parallel will greatly improve performance, but I am concerned about the implementation and am looking for some confirmation. Take the following controller resources

[HttpGet]
[Route("{id}")]
public IHttpActionResult Get(int id)
{
     return Ok(_context.Get(id));
}

[HttpGet]
[Route("async/{id}")]
public async Task<IHttpActionResult> Get(int id)
{
     return Ok(await _context.GetAsync(id));
}

The contents of Get(...) function are fairly straight forward. A WCF call is made using the passed id to retrieve document a object. That document object contains a list of associated material numbers for which I need to make a separate WCF call for each to gather additional data

public DocumentModel Get(int id)
{
     //Call to WCF service
     DocumentModel model = _documents.Get(id);

     //For each material, make a call to WCF service
     //Potential for bottle neck due to possibility of large number of associated materials
     foreach (Material material in model.Materials)
         model.MaterialModels.Add(_materials.Get(material.Number));

     return model;
}

It is worth noting that I am using a library developed and maintained by a colleague to call WCF services that are hosted on the same VM, so lets just say that I don't have access to modify this library for sake of the question. Retrieving a material looks like the following

public MaterialModel Get(string number)
{
     using(var client = new MaterialClient(out WcfResult result))
    {
         client.Get(number, out Material material, out Result result);
         return new MaterialModel(material);
    }
}

Everything works as expected, but as previously noted its possible for a significant number of materials to be returned (~20-60). Typically, I wouldn't encounter a problem like this since I would be utilizing HATEOAS and supplying the resource for each material in the DocumentModel object, however; this is an API for internal business use and the business requires all the data be in the response so I am left with little choice. So I made a separate implementation that will retrieve that material data in parallel

public async Task<DocumentModel> GetAsync(int id)
{
     //Call to WCF service
     DocumentModel model = _documents.Get(id);
     IEnumerable<Task<MaterialModel>> tasks = model.Materials.Select(material => 
          _materials.GetAsync(material.Number));

     MaterialModel[] result = await Task.WhenAll(tasks);
     model.MaterialModels.AddRange(result);
     return model;
}

Here is where my concern is. There are no Async implementations in the library, so my initial thought was to just do the following

public Task<MaterialModel> GetAsync(string number)
{
     //This concerns me
     return Task.Run(() =>
     {
         using(var client = new MaterialClient(out WcfResult result))
         {
              client.Get(number, out Material material, out Result result);
              return new MaterialModel(material);
         }
     });
}

Both implementations work, but when I run them both side by side the one making calls in parallel is significantly faster and diagnostics shows the flow is what I expected as well

---

Is this an acceptable implementation or are there some pitfalls to this I may not be aware about?

Answer 1

I think instead of creating an unknown amount of task using PLinq would make it simpler and have control over the number of task inflight/created

something like

var result = model.Materials
                .AsParallel()
                .WithDegreeOfParallelism(8) // whatever you want or leave it out 
                .Select(material => _materials.Get(material.Number));

model.MaterialModels.AddRange(result);

This way it's not trying to make synchronous code async and can limit the amount of task inflight vs unlimited amount.