Handle large number of PUT requests to a rest api - asp.net

Question

I have been trying to find a way to make this task more efficient. I am consuming a REST based web service and need to update information for over 2500 clients.
I am using fiddler to watch the requests, and I'm also updating a table with an update time when its complete. I'm getting about 1 response per second. Are my expectations to high? I'm not even sure what I would define as 'fast' in this context.
I am handling everything in my controller and have tried running multiple web requests in parallel based on examples around the place but it doesn't seem to make a difference. To be honest I don't understand it well enough and was just trying to get it to build. I suspect it is still waiting for each request to complete before firing again.
I have also increased connections in my web config file as per another suggestion with no success:
<system.net>
<connectionManagement>
<add address="*" maxconnection="20" />
</connectionManagement>
</system.net>
My Controllers action method looks like this:
public async Task<ActionResult> UpdateMattersAsync()
{
//Only get matters we haven't synced yet
List<MatterClientRepair> repairList = Data.Get.AllUnsyncedMatterClientRepairs(true);
//Take the next 500
List<MatterClientRepair> subRepairList = repairList.Take(500).ToList();
FinalisedMatterViewModel vm = new FinalisedMatterViewModel();
using (ApplicationDbContext db = new ApplicationDbContext())
{
int jobCount = 0;
foreach (var job in subRepairList)
{
// If not yet synced - it shouldn't ever be!!
if (!job.Synced)
{
jobCount++;
// set up some Authentication fields
var oauth = new OAuth.Manager();
oauth["access_token"] = Session["AccessToken"].ToString();
string uri = "https://app.com/api/v2/matters/" + job.Matter;
// prepare the json object for the body
MatterClientJob jsonBody = new MatterClientJob();
jsonBody.matter = new MatterForUpload();
jsonBody.matter.client_id = job.NewClient;
string jsonString = jsonBody.ToJSON();
// Send it off. It returns the whole object we updated - we don't actually do anything with it
Matter result = await oauth.Update<Matter>(uri, oauth["access_token"], "PUT", jsonString);
// update our entities
var updateJob = db.MatterClientRepairs.Find(job.ID);
updateJob.Synced = true;
updateJob.Update_Time = DateTime.Now;
db.Entry(updateJob).State = System.Data.Entity.EntityState.Modified;
if (jobCount % 50 == 0)
{
// save every 50 changes
db.SaveChanges();
}
}
}
// if there are remaining files to save
if (jobCount % 50 != 0)
{
db.SaveChanges();
}
return View("FinalisedMatters", Data.Get.AllMatterClientRepairs());
}
}
And of course the Update method itself which handles the Web requesting:
public async Task<T> Update<T>(string uri, string token, string method, string json)
{
var authzHeader = GenerateAuthzHeader(uri, method);
// prepare the token request
var request = (HttpWebRequest)WebRequest.Create(uri);
request.Headers.Add("Authorization", authzHeader);
request.Method = method;
request.ContentType = "application/json";
request.Accept = "application/json, text/javascript";
byte[] bytes = System.Text.Encoding.ASCII.GetBytes(json);
request.ContentLength = bytes.Length;
System.IO.Stream os = request.GetRequestStream();
os.Write(bytes, 0, bytes.Length);
os.Close();
WebResponse response = await request.GetResponseAsync();
using (var reader = new System.IO.StreamReader(response.GetResponseStream()))
{
return JsonConvert.DeserializeObject<T>(reader.ReadToEnd());
}
}
If it's not possible to do more than 1 request per second then I'm interested in looking at an Ajax solution so I can give the user some feedback while it is processing. In my current solution I cannot give the user feedback while the action method hasn't reached 'return' yet can I?

Answer 1

Okay it's taken me a few days (and a LOT of trial and error) but I've worked this out. Hopefully it can help others. I finally found my silver bullet. And it was probably the place I should have started:
MSDN: Consuming the Task-based Asynchronous Pattern
In the end this following line of code is what brought it all to light.
string [] pages = await Task.WhenAll(from url in urls select DownloadStringAsync(url));
I substituted a few things to make it work for a Put request as follows:
HttpResponseMessage[] results = await Task.WhenAll(from p in toUpload select client.PutAsync(p.uri, p.jsonContent));
'toUpload' is a List of MyClass:
public class MyClass
{
// the URI should be relative to the base pase
// (ie: /api/v2/matters/101)
public string uri { get; set; }
// a string in JSON format, being the body of the PUT request
public StringContent jsonContent { get; set; }
}
The key was to stop trying to put my PutAsync method inside a loop. My new line of code IS still blocking until ALL responses have come back, but that is what I wanted. Also, learning that I could use this LINQ style expression to create a Task List on the fly was immeasurably helpful. I won't post all the code (unless someone wants it) because it's not as nicely refactored as the original and I still need to check whether the response of each item was 200 OK before I record it as successfully saved in my database. So how much faster is it?
Results
I tested a sample of 50 web service calls from my local machine. (There is some saving of records to a SQL Database in Azure at the end).
Original Synchronous Code: 70.73 seconds
Asynchronous Code: 8.89 seconds
That's gone from 1.4146 requests per second down to a mind melting 0.1778 requests per second! (if you average it out)
Conclusion
My journey isn't over. I've just scratched the surface of asynchronous programming and am loving it. I need to now work out how to save only the results that have returned 200 OK. I can deserialize the HttpResponse which returns a JSON object (which has a unique ID I can look up etc.) OR I could use the Task.WhenAny method, and experiment with Interleaving.