Develop Reference

Block Controller Method while already running

I have a controller which returns a large json object. If this object does not exist, it will generate and return it afterwards. The generation takes about 5 seconds, and if the client sent the request multiple times, the object gets generated with x-times the children. So my question is: Is there a way to block the second request, until the first one finished, independent who sent the request?
Normally I would do it with a Singleton, but because I am having scoped services, singleton does not work here

Warning: this is very oppinionated and maybe not suitable for Stack Overflow, but here it is anyway
Although I'll provide no code... when things take a while to generate, you don't usually spend that time directly in controller code, but do something like "start a background task to generate the result, and provide a "task id", which can be queried on another different call).
So, my preferred course of action for this would be having two different controller actions:
Generate, which creates the background job, assigns it some id, and returns the id
GetResult, to which you pass the task id, and returns either different error codes for "job id doesn't exist", "job id isn't finished", or a 200 with the result.
This way, your clients will need to call both, however, in Generate, you can check if the job is already being created and return an existing job id.
This of course moves the need to "retry and check" to your client: in exchange, you don't leave the connection to the server opened during those 5 seconds (which could potentially be multiplied by a number of clients) and return fast.
Otherwise, if you don't care about having your clients wait for a response during those 5 seconds, you could do a simple:
if(resultDoesntExist) {
resultDoesntExist = false; // You can use locks for the boolean setters or Interlocked instead of just setting a member
resultIsBeingGenerated = true;
generateResult(); // <-- this is what takes 5 seconds
resultIsBeingGenerated = false;
}
while(resultIsBeingGenerated) { await Task.Delay(10); } // <-- other clients will wait here
var result = getResult(); // <-- this should be fast once the result is already created
return result;
note: those booleans and the actual loop could be on the controller, or on the service, or wherever you see fit: just be wary of making them thread-safe in however method you see appropriate
So you basically make other clients wait till the first one generates the result, with "almost" no CPU load on the server... however with a connection open and a thread from the threadpool used, so I just DO NOT recommend this :-)
PS: #Leaky solution above is also good, but it also shifts the responsability to retry to the client, and if you are going to do that, I'd probably go directly with a "background job id", instead of having the first (the one that generates the result) one take 5 seconds. IMO, if it can be avoided, no API action should ever take 5 seconds to return :-)

Do you have an example for Interlocked.CompareExchange?
Sure. I'm definitely not the most knowledgeable person when it comes to multi-threading stuff, but this is quite simple (as you might know, Interlocked has no support for bool, so it's customary to represent it with an integral type):
public class QueryStatus
{
private static int _flag;
// Returns false if the query has already started.
public bool TrySetStarted()
=> Interlocked.CompareExchange(ref _flag, 1, 0) == 0;
public void SetFinished()
=> Interlocked.Exchange(ref _flag, 0);
}
I think it's the safest if you use it like this, with a 'Try' method, which tries to set the value and tells you if it was already set, in an atomic way.
Besides simply adding this (I mean just the field and the methods) to your existing component, you can also use it as a separate component, injected from the IOC container as scoped. Or even injected as a singleton, and then you don't have to use a static field.
Storing state like this should be good for as long as the application is running, but if the hosted application is recycled due to inactivity, it's obviously lost. Though, that won't happen while a request is still processing, and definitely won't happen in 5 seconds.
(And if you wanted to synchronize between app service instances, you could 'quickly' save a flag to the database, in a transaction with proper isolation level set. Or use e.g. Azure Redis Cache.)
Example solution
As Kit noted, rightly so, I didn't provide a full solution above.
So, a crude implementation could go like this:
public class SomeQueryService : ISomeQueryService
{
private static int _hasStartedFlag;
private static bool TrySetStarted()
=> Interlocked.CompareExchange(ref _hasStartedFlag, 1, 0) == 0;
private static void SetFinished()
=> Interlocked.Exchange(ref _hasStartedFlag, 0);
public async Task<(bool couldExecute, object result)> TryExecute()
{
if (!TrySetStarted())
return (couldExecute: false, result: null);
// Safely execute long query.
SetFinished();
return (couldExecute: true, result: result);
}
}
// In the controller, obviously
[HttpGet()]
public async Task<IActionResult> DoLongQuery([FromServices] ISomeQueryService someQueryService)
{
var (couldExecute, result) = await someQueryService.TryExecute();
if (!couldExecute)
{
return new ObjectResult(new ProblemDetails
{
Status = StatusCodes.Status503ServiceUnavailable,
Title = "Another request has already started. Try again later.",
Type = "https://tools.ietf.org/html/rfc7231#section-6.6.4"
})
{ StatusCode = StatusCodes.Status503ServiceUnavailable };
}
return Ok(result);
}
Of course possibly you'd want to extract the 'blocking' logic from the controller action into somewhere else, for example an action filter. In that case the flag should also go into a separate component that could be shared between the query service and the filter.
General use action filter
I felt bad about my inelegant solution above, and I realized that this problem can be generalized into basically a connection number limiter on an endpoint.
I wrote this small action filter that can be applied to any endpoint (multiple endpoints), and it accepts the number of allowed connections:
[AttributeUsage(AttributeTargets.Method, AllowMultiple = false)]
public class ConcurrencyLimiterAttribute : ActionFilterAttribute
{
private readonly int _allowedConnections;
private static readonly ConcurrentDictionary<string, int> _connections = new ConcurrentDictionary<string, int>();
public ConcurrencyLimiterAttribute(int allowedConnections = 1)
=> _allowedConnections = allowedConnections;
public override async Task OnActionExecutionAsync(ActionExecutingContext context, ActionExecutionDelegate next)
{
var key = context.HttpContext.Request.Path;
if (_connections.AddOrUpdate(key, 1, (k, v) => ++v) > _allowedConnections)
{
Close(withError: true);
return;
}
try
{
await next();
}
finally
{
Close();
}
void Close(bool withError = false)
{
if (withError)
{
context.Result = new ObjectResult(new ProblemDetails
{
Status = StatusCodes.Status503ServiceUnavailable,
Title = $"Maximum {_allowedConnections} simultaneous connections are allowed. Try again later.",
Type = "https://tools.ietf.org/html/rfc7231#section-6.6.4"
})
{ StatusCode = StatusCodes.Status503ServiceUnavailable };
}
_connections.AddOrUpdate(key, 0, (k, v) => --v);
}
}
}

SqlConnection.OpenAsync issue

I am faced with a peculiar async problem which I can reproduce easily but cannot understand.
My Current Setup
I have a WCF Service which exposes two API's - API1 and API2. Both the service contracts are synchronous. API1, looks up a dictionary in memory, then creates a task using Task.Factory.StartNew to create a new task which fetches data from a SQL server, compares it with the data from the dictionary and writes some logs. In case the SQl Server has connectivity issues, this re-tries SqlConnection.OpenAsync 3 more times. Note that the API call itself returns as soon as it has the data from the dictionary (does not wait for SQl operation to complete)
API2 is much simpler, it just calls a stored procedure on SQL server, gets the data and returns.
The code to open connection is as follows:
public static int OpenSqlConn(SqlConnection connection)
{
return OpenSqlConn(connection).Result;
}
public async static Task<int> OpenSqlConnAsync(SqlConnection connection)
{
return await OpenConnAsync(connection);
}
private static async Task<int> OpenConnAsync(SqlConnection connection)
{
int retryCounter = 0;
TimeSpan? waitTime = null;
while (true)
{
if (waitTime.HasValue)
{
await Task.Delay(waitTime.Value).ConfigureAwait(false);
}
try
{
startTime = DateTime.UtcNow;
await connection.OpenAsync().ConfigureAwait(false);
break;
}
catch (Exception e)
{
if (retryCounter >= 3)
{
SafeCloseConnection(connection);
return retryCounter;
}
retryCounter++;
waitTime = TimeSpan.FromSeconds(6);
}
}
return retryCounter;
}
The API1 code looks like below:
public API1Response API1 (API1Request request)
{
// look up in memory dictionary for the request
API1Response response = getDataFromDictionary(request);
// create a task to get some data from DB
Action action = () =>
{
GetDataFromDb(request);
}
Task.Factory.StartNew(action).ConfigureAwait(false);
// this is called immediately even if DB is not available and above task is retrying.
return API1Response;
}
public void GetDataFromDb(API1Request request)
{
using (var connection = new SqlConnection(...))
{
OpenSqlConn(connection);
/// hangs for long even if db is available
ReadDataFromDb(connection);
}
}
public API2Response API2(API2REquest request)
{
return GetDataFromDbForAPI2(request)
}
public API2Response GetDataFromDbForAPI2(API2Request request)
{
using (var connection = new SqlConnection(...))
{
OpenSqlConn(connection); /// hangs for long even if db is available
ReadDataFromDb(connection);
}
}
The Problem
The service runs into the following problem when the SQL Server is unavailable even for short periods of time, and some client makes just 100 calls to API1:
When my SQL server has connectivity issues, and I get around 100 calls of API1, even though API1 returns to the caller, it has created 100 tasks that will try to open a connection to the bad DB. Each of those tasks hangs in a retry look for some time (which is expected). In my experiments, I can simulate a DB unavailability by using a bad connection string for API1.
Now let's say the DB is back up again and a call to API2 is made to the service. What I find is that when API2 call reaches the OpenAsync portion above, it hangs. Just hangs :(
Some observations
1. When I look at the 'Parallel Stacks' from Visual Studio, I find that there are 100 threads with the API1 stack doing the following stack :
ManualResetEvenSlim.Wait()
Task.SpinThenBlockingWait
Task.InternalWait();
Task<>.GetREsultCore
OpenConn()
There is 1 thread with the API2 stack, which again is in a similar stack as above.
However, if I replace SqlConnection.OpenAsync with SqlConnection.Open(), API2 call returns immediately.
Need Help
What I would like to understand is why does the API2, which can open a DB connection (because DB is available at that time), also hang on OpenAsync. Is there any obvious synchronization issue that I am seeing? When i change SqlConnection.OpenAsync() to SqlConnection.Open() why does the behavior change?

c# How to load test a webservice

I need to test if there's any memory leak in our application and monitor to see if memory usage increases too much while processing the requests.
I'm trying to develop some code to make multiple simultaneous calls to our api/webservice method. This api method is not asynchronous and takes some time to complete its operation.
I've made a lot of research about Tasks, Threads and Parallelism, but so far I had no luck. The problem is, even after trying all the below solutions, the result is always the same, it appears to be processing only two requests at the time.
Tried:
-> Creating tasks inside a simple for loop and starting them with and without setting them with TaskCreationOptions.LongRunning
-> Creating threads inside a simple for loop and starting them with and without high priority
-> Creating a list of actions on a simple for loop and starting them using
Parallel.Foreach(list, options, item => item.Invoke)
-> Running directly inside a Parallel.For loop (below)
-> Running TPL methods with and without Options and TaskScheduler
-> Tried with different values for MaxParallelism and maximum threads
-> Checked this post too, but it didn't help either. (Could I be missing something?)
-> Checked some other posts here in Stackoverflow, but with F# solutions that I don't know how to properly translate them to C#. (I never used F#...)
(Task Scheduler class taken from msdn)
Here's the basic structure that I have:
public class Test
{
Data _data;
String _url;
public Test(Data data, string url)
{
_data = data;
_url = url;
}
public ReturnData Execute()
{
ReturnData returnData;
using(var ws = new WebService())
{
ws.Url = _url;
ws.Timeout = 600000;
var wsReturn = ws.LongRunningMethod(data);
// Basically convert wsReturn to my method return, with some logic if/else etc
}
return returnData;
}
}
sealed class ThreadTaskScheduler : TaskScheduler, IDisposable
{
// The runtime decides how many tasks to create for the given set of iterations, loop options, and scheduler's max concurrency level.
// Tasks will be queued in this collection
private BlockingCollection<Task> _tasks = new BlockingCollection<Task>();
// Maintain an array of threads. (Feel free to bump up _n.)
private readonly int _n = 100;
private Thread[] _threads;
public TwoThreadTaskScheduler()
{
_threads = new Thread[_n];
// Create unstarted threads based on the same inline delegate
for (int i = 0; i < _n; i++)
{
_threads[i] = new Thread(() =>
{
// The following loop blocks until items become available in the blocking collection.
// Then one thread is unblocked to consume that item.
foreach (var task in _tasks.GetConsumingEnumerable())
{
TryExecuteTask(task);
}
});
// Start each thread
_threads[i].IsBackground = true;
_threads[i].Start();
}
}
// This method is invoked by the runtime to schedule a task
protected override void QueueTask(Task task)
{
_tasks.Add(task);
}
// The runtime will probe if a task can be executed in the current thread.
// By returning false, we direct all tasks to be queued up.
protected override bool TryExecuteTaskInline(Task task, bool taskWasPreviouslyQueued)
{
return false;
}
public override int MaximumConcurrencyLevel { get { return _n; } }
protected override IEnumerable<Task> GetScheduledTasks()
{
return _tasks.ToArray();
}
// Dispose is not thread-safe with other members.
// It may only be used when no more tasks will be queued
// to the scheduler. This implementation will block
// until all previously queued tasks have completed.
public void Dispose()
{
if (_threads != null)
{
_tasks.CompleteAdding();
for (int i = 0; i < _n; i++)
{
_threads[i].Join();
_threads[i] = null;
}
_threads = null;
_tasks.Dispose();
_tasks = null;
}
}
}
And the test code itself:
private void button2_Click(object sender, EventArgs e)
{
var maximum = 100;
var options = new ParallelOptions
{
MaxDegreeOfParallelism = 100,
TaskScheduler = new ThreadTaskScheduler()
};
// To prevent UI blocking
Task.Factory.StartNew(() =>
{
Parallel.For(0, maximum, options, i =>
{
var data = new Data();
// Fill data
var test = new Test(data, _url); //_url is pre-defined
var ret = test.Execute();
// Check return and display on screen
var now = DateTime.Now.ToString("HH:mm:ss");
var newText = $"{Environment.NewLine}[{now}] - {ret.ReturnId}) {ret.ReturnDescription}";
AppendTextBox(newText, ref resultTextBox);
}
}
public void AppendTextBox(string value, ref TextBox textBox)
{
if (InvokeRequired)
{
this.Invoke(new ActionRef<string, TextBox>(AppendTextBox), value, textBox);
return;
}
textBox.Text += value;
}
And the result that I get is basically this:
[10:08:56] - (0) OK
[10:08:56] - (0) OK
[10:09:23] - (0) OK
[10:09:23] - (0) OK
[10:09:49] - (0) OK
[10:09:50] - (0) OK
[10:10:15] - (0) OK
[10:10:16] - (0) OK
etc
As far as I know there's no limitation on the server side. I'm relatively new to the Parallel/Multitasking world. Is there any other way to do this? Am I missing something?
(I simplified all the code for clearness and I believe that the provided code is enough to picture the mentioned scenarios. I also didn't post the application code, but it's a simple WinForms screen just to call and show results. If any code is somehow relevant, please let me know, I can edit and post it too.)
Thanks in advance!
EDIT1: I checked on the server logs that it's receiving the requests two by two, so it's indeed something related to sending them, not receiving.
Could it be a network problem/limitation related to how the framework manages the requests/connections? Or something with the network at all (unrelated to .net)?
EDIT2: Forgot to mention, it's a SOAP webservice.
EDIT3: One of the properties that I send (inside data) needs to change for each request.
EDIT4: I noticed that there's always an interval of ~25 secs between each pair of request, if it's relevant.

I would recommend not to reinvent the wheel and just use one of the existing solutions:
Most obvious choice: if your Visual Studio license allows you can use MS Load Testing Framework, most likely you won't even have to write a single line of code: How to: Create a Web Service Test
SoapUI is a free and open source web services testing tool, it has some limited load testing capabilities
If for some reasons SoapUI is not suitable (i.e. you need to run load tests in clustered mode from several hosts or you need more enhanced reporting) you can use Apache JMeter - free and open source multiprotocol load testing tool which supports web services load testing as well.

A good solution to create load tests without write a own project is use this service https://loader.io/targets
It is free for small tests, you can POST Parameters, Header,... and you have a nice reporting.

Isnt the "two requests at a time" the result of the default maxconnection=2 limit on connectionManagement?
<configuration>
<system.net>
<connectionManagement>
<add address = "http://www.contoso.com" maxconnection = "4" />
<add address = "*" maxconnection = "2" />
</connectionManagement>
</system.net>
</configuration>

My favorite load testing library is NBomber. It has an easy and powerful API, realistic user simulations, and provides you with nice HTML reports about latency and requests per second.
I used it to test my API and wrote an article about how I did it.

How do I make my application responsive during Entity Framework operations?

I have a fairly simple WPF application that uses Entity Framework. The main page of the application has a list of records that I am getting from a database on startup.
Each record has a picture, so the operation can be a little slow when the wireless signal is poor. I'd like this (and many of my SQL operations) to perform in the background if possible. I have async/await setup and at first it seemed to be working exactly as I wanted but now I'm seeing that my application is becoming unresponsive when accessing the DB.
Eventually I'm thinking I'm going to load up the text in one query and the images in another background operation and load them as they come in. This way I get the important stuff right away and the pictures can come in in the background, but the way things are going it's still looking like it will lock up if I do this.
On top of that, I'm trying to implement something to handle connectivity issues (in case the wifi cuts out momentarily) so that the application notifies the user of a connection issue, automatically retries a few times, etc. I put a try catch for SQL exception which seems to be working for me, but the whole application locks up for about a minute while it is trying to connect to the DB.
I tried testing my async/await using await Task.Delay() and everything is very responsive as expected while awaiting the delay, but everything locks up when awaiting the .ToListAsync(). Is this normal and expected? My understanding of async/await is pretty limited.
My code is kind of messy (I'm new) but it does what I need it to do for the most part. I understand there's probably plenty of improvements I can make and better ways to do things, but one step at a time here. My main goal right now is to keep the application from crashing during database accessing exceptions and to keep the user notified of what the application is doing (searching, trying to access db, unable to reach DB and retrying, etc) as opposed to being frozen, which is what they're going to think when they see it being unresponsive for over a minute.
Some of my code:
In my main view model
DataHelper data = new DataHelper();
private async void GetQualityRegisterQueueAsync()
{
try
{
var task = data.GetQualityRegisterAsync();
IsSearching = true;
await task;
IsSearching = false;
QualityRegisterItems = new ObservableCollection<QualityRegisterQueue>(task.Result);
OrderQualityRegisterItems();
}
catch (M1Exception ex)
{
Debug.WriteLine(ex.Message);
Debug.WriteLine("QualityRegisterLogViewModel.GetQualityRegisterQueue() Operation Failed");
}
}
My Data Helper Class
public class DataHelper
{
private bool debugging = false;
private const int MAX_RETRY = 2;
private const double LONG_WAIT_SECONDS = 5;
private const double SHORT_WAIT_SECONDS = 0.5;
private static readonly TimeSpan longWait = TimeSpan.FromSeconds(LONG_WAIT_SECONDS);
private static readonly TimeSpan shortWait = TimeSpan.FromSeconds(SHORT_WAIT_SECONDS);
private enum RetryableSqlErrors
{
ServerNotFound = -1,
Timeout = -2,
NoLock = 1204,
Deadlock = 1205,
}
public async Task<List<QualityRegisterQueue>> GetQualityRegisterAsync()
{
if(debugging) await Task.Delay(5000);
var retryCount = 0;
using (M1Context m1 = new M1Context())
{
for (; ; )
{
try
{
return await (from a in m1.QualityRegisters
where (a.qanClosed == 0)
//orderby a.qanAssignedDate descending, a.qanOpenedDate
orderby a.qanAssignedDate.HasValue descending, a.qanAssignedDate, a.qanOpenedDate
select new QualityRegisterQueue
{
QualityRegisterID = a.qanQualityRegisterID,
JobID = a.qanJobID.Trim(),
JobAssemblyID = a.qanJobAssemblyID,
JobOperationID = a.qanJobOperationID,
PartID = a.qanPartID.Trim(),
PartRevisionID = a.qanPartRevisionID.Trim(),
PartShortDescription = a.qanPartShortDescription.Trim(),
OpenedByEmployeeID = a.qanOpenedByEmployeeID.Trim(),
OpenedByEmployeeName = a.OpenedEmployee.lmeEmployeeName.Trim(),
OpenedDate = a.qanOpenedDate,
PartImage = a.JobAssembly.ujmaPartImage,
AssignedDate = a.qanAssignedDate,
AssignedToEmployeeID = a.qanAssignedToEmployeeID.Trim(),
AssignedToEmployeeName = a.AssignedEmployee.lmeEmployeeName.Trim()
}).ToListAsync();
}
catch (SqlException ex)
{
Debug.WriteLine("SQL Exception number = " + ex.Number);
if (!Enum.IsDefined(typeof(RetryableSqlErrors), ex.Number))
throw new M1Exception(ex.Message, ex);
retryCount++;
if (retryCount > MAX_RETRY) throw new M1Exception(ex.Message, ex); ;
Debug.WriteLine("Retrying. Count = " + retryCount);
Thread.Sleep(ex.Number == (int)RetryableSqlErrors.Timeout ?
longWait : shortWait);
}
}
}
}
}
Edit: Mostly looking for general guidance here, though a specific example of what to do would be great. For these types of operations where I am downloading data, is it just a given that if I need the application to be responsive I need to be making multiple threads? Is that a common solution to this type of problem? Is this not something I should be expecting async/await to solve?

If you call this method from your UI thread, you will overload the capture of UI thread context and back on itself. Also, your service will not be necessarily "Performant" because it must wait until the UI thread is free before it can continue.
The solution is simple: just call the method passing the ConfigureAwait "false" parameter when you made the call.
.ToListAsync().ConfigureAwaiter(false);
I hope it helps

Parallel processing mix up

I am new to C# programming.
I am trying to get the number of updates fror a list of servers using background worker. Result for every server is shown in a listview at the report progress method.
I am able to successfully get results using foreach loop, but while trying to get the same results using parallel foreach, all the columns and rows of the listview are mixed up.
for example:
output of foreach loop:
Server Name Status Updates Available
server1 Login to server failed! 0
server2 Updates are available 3
server3 Updates are available 3
server4 Up to Date 0
and so on..
output of parallel foreach:
server1 Updates are available 1
server1 Login to server failed! 1
server2 Login to server failed! 0
server3 Login to server failed! 0
server4 Login to server failed! 0
server4 Updates are available 3
and so on..
I have tried locking parts of the code and have also tried using concurrent bag but was not quite able to resolve the issue. Below is the parallelforeach code. I am doing someting wrong? Any suggestions would be of great help.
Parallel.ForEach(namelist, /*new ParallelOptions { MaxDegreeOfParallelism = 4 }, */line =>
//foreach (string line in namelist)
{
if (worker.CancellationPending)
{
e.Cancel = true;
worker.ReportProgress(SysCount, obj);
}
else
{
this.SystemName = line;//file.ReadLine();
Status.sVariables result = new Status.sVariables();
result = OneSystem(this.SystemName);
switch (result.BGWResult)
{
case -1:
this.StatusString = "Login to server failed!";
break;
//other status are assigned here;
}
SysCount++;
bag.Add(this);
}
Status returnobj;
bag.TryTake(out returnobj);
worker.ReportProgress(SysCount, returnobj);
Thread.Sleep(200);
});
ReportProgress Method:
private void backgroundWorker1_ProgressChanged(object sender, ProgressChangedEventArgs e)
{
if (!backgroundWorker1.CancellationPending)
{
Status result = (Status)e.UserState;
Complete_label.Visible = true;
if (listView1.InvokeRequired)
listView1.Invoke(new MethodInvoker(delegate
{
listView1.Items.Add("");
listView1.Items[result.SysCount - 1].SubItems.Add(result.SystemName);
listView1.Items[result.SysCount - 1].SubItems.Add(result.StatusString);
listView1.Items[result.SysCount - 1].SubItems.Add(result.AvailableUpdatesCount.ToString());
}));
else
{
try
{
listView1.Items.Add("");
listView1.Items[result.SysCount - 1].SubItems.Add(result.SystemName);
listView1.Items[result.SysCount - 1].SubItems.Add(result.StatusString);
listView1.Items[result.SysCount - 1].SubItems.Add(result.AvailableUpdatesCount.ToString());
}
catch (Exception ex)
{}
//other stuff
}
}

The real problem is that the ListView updating code uses the wrong index to update items. It assumes the Status.SysCount property contains the correct index. This may be true if execution happens in sequence, but fails if execution runs in parallel - different threads can finish at different speeds and report progress out-of-order.
The actual problem can be fixed simply by using the ListViewItem object returned by ListViewItemCollection.Add
private void backgroundWorker1_ProgressChanged(object sender, ProgressChangedEventArgs e)
{
if (!backgroundWorker1.CancellationPending)
{
Status result = (Status)e.UserState;
Complete_label.Visible = true;
var newItem=listView1.Items.Add("");
newItem.SubItems.Add(result.SystemName);
newItem.SubItems.Add(result.StatusString);
newItem.SubItems.Add(result.AvailableUpdatesCount.ToString());
//other stuff
}
}
The code has more serious problems though - the State class tries to process data in parallel, storing the data in its own properties, then sending itself for reporting. Obviously, the data that gets displayed will always be changing.
A better option is either to create a new State instance inside the loop or, better yet, create a class only for reporting:
class StatusProgress
{
public string SystemName{get;set;}
public string StatusString{get;set;}
public int AvailableUpdatesCount {get;set;}
}
....
int sysCount=0;
Parallel.ForEach(namelist, line =>
{
var progress=new StatusProgress();
progress.SystemName = line;//file.ReadLine();
Status.sVariables result = new Status.sVariables();
result = OneSystem(line);
switch (result.BGWResult)
{
case -1:
progress.StatusString = "Login to server failed!";
break;
//other status are assigned here;
}
var count=Interlocked.Increment(ref sysCount);
}
worker.ReportProgress(count, progress);
});
Notice that instead of SysCount++ is use Interlocked.Increment to increase the value atomically and get a copy of the incremented value. If I didn't do that, multiple threads could modify SysCount before I had a chance to report progress.
The progress reporting code would change to use StateProgress
StatusProgress result = (StatusProgress)e.UserState;
Finally, the BackgroundWorker is obsolete as the Task Parallel Library offers everything the BGW did and more, in a far more lightweight manner. For example, you can cancel the parallel loop by using a CancellationToken and report progress in a type-safe manner using the Progress class.
Most asynchronous methods in .NET recognize CancellationToken and Progress which means you can report progress and cancel asynchronous tasks easily as shown here.
The code could be rewritten like this:
On a UI form:
private void ReportServerProgress(StatusProgress result)
{
Complete_label.Visible = true;
var newItem=listView1.Items.Add("");
newItem.SubItems.Add(result.SystemName);
newItem.SubItems.Add(result.StatusString);
newItem.SubItems.Add(result.AvailableUpdatesCount.ToString());
//other stuff
}
CancellationTokenSource _cts;
Progress<StatusProgress> _progress;
public void StartProcessiong()
{
_cts=new CancellationTokenSource();
_progress=new Progress<StatusProgress(progress=>ReportServerProgress(progress);
StartProcessing(/*input*/,_cts.Token,_progress);
}
public void CancelLoop()
{
if (_cts!=null)
_cts.Cancel();
}
The processing code can be on the same form or any other class. In fact, it's better to separate the UI from the processing code, especially when you have non-trivial processing, eg calling each server to determine its status
public void StartProcessing(/*input parameters*/,
CancellationTokenSource token,
IProgress<StatusProgress> progress)
{
.....
var po=new ParallelOptions();
po.CancellationToken=token;
Parallel.ForEach(namelist, po,line =>
{
var status=new StatusProgress();
status.SystemName = line;//file.ReadLine();
Status.sVariables result = new Status.sVariables();
result = OneSystem(line);
switch (result.BGWResult)
{
case -1:
progress.StatusString = "Login to server failed!";
break;
//other status are assigned here;
}
progress.Report(status);
}
}
Many asynchronous .NET methods accept a cancellation token, so you can pass it eg to a Web Service call and ensure both the loop and any outstanding long calls are cancelled.

Your results are all mixed up because you are using a parallel operation to write to global state, eg SystemName and StatusString, thus the contents of those global variables will end up all mixed up when you try to read and print their values.
You could introduce a lock, but this would completely defeat the point of the Parallel.ForEach. So either abandon he use of the Parallel.ForEach (which seems to serve no useful purpose in this instance) or you need to gather data and ensure it's sent to the reporter in a thread-safe fashion.
To further explain, let's examine the code:
this.SystemName = line; // <- the worker has now written to this, which is global to all workers
...
result = OneSystem(this.SystemName); // <- another worker may have overwritten SystemName at this point
...
this.StatusString = "Login to server failed!"; // <- again writing to shared variable
...
bag.Add(this); // <- now trying to "thread protect" already corrupted data
So if you must run the loop in parallel, each worker must update only its own isolated data then push that off to the GUI marshalling report method.