I have written an HttpModule that spawns a background thread. I'm using the thread like a Scheduled Task that runs in-process, which is really handy.
What are best practices for keeping track of this thread? I've never done this before, and I'm a little confused about some aspects of it:
How do I know if the thread is still running? I see it do its job, but is there another way to know if it's still alive? I downloaded ProcMon, but w3wp.exe spawns a boatload of threads, so I had no idea which was my thread. I named it, but that didn't help.
How do I "catch" the thread if it dies? Is there some kind of Dispose method where I can have it write to the EventLog or something if it fails? A "dying declaration" or something?
How do I actively stop the thread? If I want it to stop running this background process, how do I kill it without having to bounce IIS?
Is there anyway to start it again, independently of the HttpModule? (I'm guessing the answer to this is no...)
Edit: Just to clarify, the intention is that my thread never goes away. It runs a function, then goes to sleep for a couple minutes, then wakes up and runs the function again. It's not like it's doing one task then ending.
When Jeff made Stackoverflow, he had a similiar issue.
His solution was to use the cache expiration. You'd put something in the cache and then when it expires an event is fired in a non-user facing thread. In the event handler for the expiration, you stick some code in to re-add the item to the cache and do whatever housekeeping work needs to be done for your application
Using this technique, your subquestions are easily answered:
You check the item is still in
cache.
If the item is not in
cache, re-add it.
Remove the
cache item from the cache.
Add
the item back to the cache.
You could make a small management page to configure these options.
This gives you a nice way to roughly time housekeeping processes in your web-application. It doesn't require a seperate Windows Service, which is a big win.
From my experience, you can get this to work "good enough", but not perfect. I would recommend to implement your repeating tasks in a windows service. Depending on what the tasks do, the Windows Service maybe wouldn't even have to talk to the web application or vice versa, e. g. if both work with the same database. Otherwise you could still use e. g. WCF for communication.
The big advantage is: The windows service will start with the OS, you can easily configure, start and stop it using the control panel, you have built-in monitoring via Windows Event Log, you can update the background service and the web application independently etc.
If this is not an option, e. g. because you are in a shared hosting environment, I would recommend the following:
Start your background thread in Application_start (Global.asax), and store the thread reference in a static variable.
Wrap every method called on your background thread with try/catch, because since .NET 2.0, every unhandled exception on a background thread will shut down the application. (It will be restarted on the next request, but it slows down the next request, kills all current sessions and caches, and of course no timer will be active until the next request.)
On every request (implemented has a HttpModule or in Global.asax again), check the Thread instance in the global variable (is it still != null, is the thread active and running etc.). If not, call the restart code. Use locking in the restart part to make sure that the thread will not be created twice at same time.
Even then you can't be sure that your background thread is always running, if you don't have regular traffic around the clock. Also keep in mind that in a shared hosting environment it is very common to shut down application pools if there is no activity for a few hours. You could try to improve this by setting up a scheduled task on a client machine on your own network doing a light-weight HTTP request on your application every few minutes, just to ensure that your application is always running.
Related
I do have a quick question regarding extra foreground threads that are running in an ASP.net Web Application.
I let some things run in an extra Thread class thread like Cleanup-Actions after a certain event, but the user is not interested in those operations, therefore the threads - these operations should just run ( rather in the background ) and have nothing to do with serving requests.
What happens when the application crashes, because of an uncaught exception - will the extra thread run to completion or does IIS cancel it immediately ?
What does happen when the application pool recycles ?
I know that it would be a better approach by using separate programms for jobs like this.. Windows Service for example, but I "inherited" that code by former employees..
Any work being done or queued inside ASP.NET can be lost at any time. It is not necessary to answer your questions in detail because they are moot. There are many reasons the whole process can just go away.
Windows Services also can go away at any time (crash, blue screen, ...).
If you need reliable execution you need to persist the work. Some kind of message queue (could be a database table) is appropriate.
I am currently using SignalR in and ASP.Net MVC 4 appliation. I am consuming messages from RabbitMQ, and in essence need to broadcast via SignalR whenever a new message hits the queue. Problem is under normal usage there is not a place where a long lived object can live within IIS. I am getting about 1000 messages a second, so the standard approach of pushing the message into IIS by making a request from an outside queue monitoring service/app would pretty much kill my IIS.
I have a general idea of creating a singleton instance on a background thread. Not sure whats the best way to do this in iis, would want the singleton to automatically be recreated if the application dies.
Are you thinking you would have something in a background thread that would check for messages every so often?
I have used quartz.net to create scheduled jobs in the past. They are fairly simple to set up. You can basically just say, execute this job every x interval starting at y time. With whatever solution you go with you will probably need to add in error handling. I think your quartz job would keep trying to execute every x interval even if it threw an exception, but you will need to make sure that you clear out whatever caused the exception in the first place. Otherwise every time it runs it will fail. I.E. like if there is something wrong with your message such that it will error every time you try and broadcast it.
Watch out for IdleTimeout of your application. If IIS puts your web app to sleep your singleton in your background worker/quartz job goes to sleep too. If you set IdleTimeout to 0 your application will never sleep.
If you init your job/worker in Global.asax.cs Application_Start() your job will always start when your web app does.
When you first deploy your app or update it or restart it you will need to make sure your app is running. Not sure if there is a setting for this in IIS. But normally your application doesn't start up until a request is made to it. Good luck. Let me know if you find a solution to this.
Same deal if you app crashes for some other reason. You need something to re-start your web app.
Hope that helps!
I have a aspx web application that updates or adds files in a database. The clients access through the browser and one of the requirements is that they can start the update and be able to close the browser while the update continues. It appears to run for a little bit after I close the browser but then it stops. How can you keep the application running for asp.net?
That's something you could very well solve with WF (Workflow Foundation). Create a workflow for the task that should survive closing the browser. Workflows have their own threads and livecycles separate from ASP.NET.
The web application will keep running in the application pool, but this will be recycled eventually. As long as the users session runs the application should be kept alive, so by upping the session timeout you may fix the problem.
A better approach though would be to move the long-running task into a service instead, but that may require a rewrite of your application.
Usually for long-running or asynchronous processing, you want to dispatch the request to a back-end service to handle. Trying to keep the web-app alive to finish processing can lead to problems, especially with HTTP and session timeouts.
A common pattern for this is to put the request on a message queue and let a back-end service process it when it can.
I would create a separate windows service that you can push jobs onto from your web application, then check the status of the job(s) when the user logs in again.
The windows service won't be tied to the asp.net app domain so it will continue to run regardless of whats happening in your web application.
I've run into this pattern and you have to decouple the work from the HTTP request. The way we've solved it is to abstract the computing to be done as an event to be scheduled. So, say a user at a browser takes an action that requires a long lived (relatively) computation on the back end, this computation is given a name like 'doXYZForUser' and given a prameter vector like (userId, params...) and sent off to the work queue. Some time in the future the user logs in again and can see what the status of their job is.
I'm running a Java stack and a Java Message Service (JMS) but the principle is the same. The request from the browser queues up an event and the browser get an ACK back saying the event is on the work queue. The queue is managed by an entirely separately running process which in .NET I believe is just called the Message Queue. The job comes up on the queue gets processed and the results can be placed in a separate table containing a reference to the user that kicked off the job, so the next time they log in job status/results can be returned.
In an ASP.Net application, the user clicks a button on the webpage and this then instantiates an object on the server through the event handler and calls a method on the object.
The method goes off to an external system to do stuff and this could take a while. So, what I would like to do is run that method call in another thread so I can return control to the user with "Your request has been submitted".
I am reasonably happy to do this as fire-and-forget, though it would be even nicer if the user could keep polling the object for status.
What I don't know is if IIS allows my thread to keep running, even if the user session expires.
Imagine, the user fires the event and we instantiate the object on the server and fire the method in a new thread. The user is happy with the "Your request has been submitted" message and closes his browser. Eventually, this users session will time out on IIS, but the thread may still be running, doing work. Will IIS allow the thread to keep running or will it kill it and dispose of the object once the user session expires?
EDIT: From the answers and comments, I understand that the best way to do this is to move the long-running processing outside of IIS. Apart from everything else, this deals with the appdomain recycling problem. In practice, I need to get version 1 off the ground in limited time and has to work inside an existing framework, so would like to avoid the service layer, hence the desire to just fire off the thread inside IIS. In practice, "long running" here will only be a few minutes and the concurrency on the website will be low so it should be okay. But, next version definitely will need splitting into a separate service layer.
You can accomplish what you want, but it is typically a bad idea. Several ASP.NET blog and CMS engines take this approach, because they want to be installable on a shared hosting system and not take a dependency on a windows service that needs to be installed. Typically they kick off a long running thread in Global.asax when the app starts, and have that thread process queued up tasks.
In addition to reducing resources available to IIS/ASP.NET to process requests, you also have issues with the thread being killed when the AppDomain is recycled, and then you have to deal with persistence of the task while it is in-flight, as well as starting the work back up when the AppDomain comes back up.
Keep in mind that in many cases the AppDomain is recycled automatically at a default interval, as well as if you update the web.config, etc.
If you can handle the persistence and transactional aspects of your thread being killed at any time, then you can get around the AppDomain recycling by having some external process that makes a request on your site at some interval - so that if the site is recycled you are guaranteed to have it start back up again automatically within X minutes.
Again, this is typically a bad idea.
EDIT: Here are some examples of this technique in action:
Community Server: Using Windows Services vs. Background Thread to Run Code at Scheduled Intervals
Creating a Background Thread When Website First Starts
EDIT (from the far distant future) - These days I would use Hangfire.
I disagree with the accepted answer.
Using a background thread (or a task, started with Task.Factory.StartNew) is fine in ASP.NET. As with all hosting environments, you may want to understand and cooperate with the facilities governing shutdown.
In ASP.NET, you can register work needing to stop gracefully on shutdown using the HostingEnvironment.RegisterObject method. See this article and the comments for a discussion.
(As Gerard points out in his comment, there's now also HostingEnvironment.QueueBackgroundWorkItem that calls down to RegisterObject to register a scheduler for the background item to work on. Overall the new method is nicer since it's task-based.)
As for the general theme that you often hear of it being a bad idea, consider the alternative of deploying a windows service (or another kind of extra-process application):
No more trivial deployment with web deploy
Not deployable purely on Azure Websites
Depending on the nature of the background task, the processes will likely have to communicate. That means either some form of IPC or the service will have to access a common database.
Note also that some advanced scenarios might even need the background thread to be running in the same address space as the requests. I see the fact that ASP.NET can do this as a great advantage that has become possible through .NET.
You wouldn't want to use a thread from the IIS thread pool for this task because it would leave that thread unable to process future requests. You could look into Asynchronous Pages in ASP.NET 2.0, but that really wouldn't be the right answer, either. Instead, what it sounds like you would benefit from is looking into Microsoft Message Queuing. Essentially, you would add the task details to the queue and another background process (possibly a Windows Service) would be in charge of carrying out that task. But the bottom line is that the background process is completely isolated from IIS.
I would suggest to use HangFire for such requirements. Its a nice fire and forget engine runs in background, supports different architecture, reliable because it is backed by persistence storage.
There is a good thread and sample code here: http://forums.asp.net/t/1534903.aspx?PageIndex=2
I've even toyed with the idea of calling a keep alive page on my website from the thread to help keep the app pool alive. Keep in mind if you are using this method that you need really good recovery handling, because the application could recycle at any time. As many have mentioned this is not the right approach if you have access to other service options, but for shared hosting this may be one of your only options.
To help keep the app pool alive, you could make a request to your own site while the thread is processing. This may help keep the app pool alive if your process runs a long time.
string tempStr = GetUrlPageSource("http://www.mysite.com/keepalive.aspx");
public static string GetUrlPageSource(string url)
{
string returnString = "";
try
{
Uri uri = new Uri(url);
if (uri.Scheme == Uri.UriSchemeHttp)
{
HttpWebRequest req = (HttpWebRequest)WebRequest.Create(uri);
CookieContainer cookieJar = new CookieContainer();
req.CookieContainer = cookieJar;
//set the request timeout to 60 seconds
req.Timeout = 60000;
req.UserAgent = "MyAgent";
//we do not want to request a persistent connection
req.KeepAlive = false;
HttpWebResponse resp = (HttpWebResponse)req.GetResponse();
Stream stream = resp.GetResponseStream();
StreamReader sr = new StreamReader(stream);
returnString = sr.ReadToEnd();
sr.Close();
stream.Close();
resp.Close();
}
}
catch
{
returnString = "";
}
return returnString;
}
We started down this path, and it actually worked ok when our app was on one server. When we wanted to scale out to multiple machines (or use multiple w3wp in a web garen) we had to re-evaluate and look at how to manage a work queue, error handling, retries and the tricky problem of correctly locking to ensure only one server picks up the next item.
... we realized we are not in the business of writing background processing engines so we looked for existing solutions and we landed up using the awesome OSS project hangfire
Sergey Odinokov has created a real gem which is really easy to get started with, and allows you to swap out the backend of how work is persisted and queued. Hangfire uses background threads, but persists the jobs, handles retries and gives you visibility into the work queue. So hangfire jobs are robust and survive all the vagaries of appdomains being recycled etc.
Its basic setup uses sql server as the storage but you can swap out for Redis or MSMQ when its time to scale up. It also has an excellent UI for visualizing all the jobs and their status plus allowing you to re-queue jobs.
My point is that while its entirely possible to do what you want in an background thread, there is a lot of work to make it scalable and robust. Its fine for simple workloads but when things get more complex I much prefer to use a purpose built library rather than go through this effort.
For some more perspective on options available check out Scott Hanselman's blog which covers off a few options for handling background jobs in asp.net. (He gave hangfire a glowing review)
Also as referenced by John its worth reading up Phil Haack's blog on why the approach is problematic, and how to gracefully stop work on the thread when appdomain is unloaded.
Can you create a windows service to do that task? Then use .NET remoting from the Web Server to call the Windows Service to do the action? If that is the case that is what I would do.
This would eliminate the need to relay on IIS, and limit some of its processing power.
If not then I would force the user to sit there while the process is done. That way you ensure it is completed and not killed by IIS.
There does seem to be one supported way of hosting long-running work in IIS. Workflow Services seem designed for this, especially in conjunction with Windows Server AppFabric. The design allows for application pool recycling by supporting automatic persistence and resumption of the long-running work.
You may run tasks in the background and they will complete even after the request ends. Don't let an uncaught exception be thrown. Normally you want to always throw your exceptions. If an exception is thrown in a new thread then it will crash the IIS worker process - w3wp.exe, because you are no longer in the request's context. That's also then going to kill any other background tasks you have running in addition to in-process memory backed sessions if you are using them. This would be hard to diagnose, which is why the practice is discouraged.
Just create a surrogate process to run the async tasks; it doesn't have to be a windows service (although that is the more optimal approach in most cases. MSMQ is way over kill.
What kind of multi-threading issues do you have to be careful for in asp.net?
It's risky to spawn threads from the code-behind of an ASP.NET page, because the worker process will get recycled occasionally and your thread will die.
If you need to kick off long-running processes as a result of user actions on web pages, your best bet is to drop a message off in MSMQ and have a separate background service monitoring the queue. The service could take as long as it wants to accomplish the task, and the web page would be finished with its work almost immediately. You could accomplish the same thing with an asynch call to a web method, but don't rely on getting the response when the web method is finished working. From code-behind, it needs to be a quick fire-and-forget.
One thing to watch out for at things that expire (I think httpContext does), if you are using it for operations that are "fire and forget" remember that all of a sudden if the asp.net cleanup code runs before your operation is done, you won't be able to access certain information.
If this is for a web service, you should definitely consider thread pooling. Too many threads will bring your application to a grinding halt because they will eventually start competing for CPU time.
Is this for file or network IO? If so, you should also consider using asynchronous IO. It can be a bit more of a pain to program, but you don't have to worry about spawning off too many threads at once.
Programmatic Caching is one area which immediately comes to my mind. It is a great feature which needs to be used carefully. Since it is shared across requests, you have to put locks around it before updating it.
Another place I would check is any code accessing filesystem like writing to log files. If one request has a read-write lock on a file, other concurrent requests will error out if not handled properly.
Isn't there a Limit of 25 Total Threads in the IIS Configuration? At least in IIS 6 i believe. If you exceed that limit, interesting things (read: loooooooong response times) may happen.
Depending on what you need, as far as multi threading is concerned, have you thought of spawning requests from the client. It's safe to spawn requests using AJAX, and then act on the results in a callback. Or use a service as a backgrounding mechanism, which runs every X minutes and processes in the background that way.