Asynchronous Processing Web age

[Thomas Nielsen]

Hi,

I need to make a web page that wait for 3 asynchronous processes to finish.

So I am considering these options

1) Poll the status of the processes from the web page using the "REFRESH"
metatag in HTML.
2) Synchronously call a monitor function on the server that poll the status
of the processes, and returns when they are done.

Are there other options? Which of the two can you recommend?

- Thomas

 

[Scott Allen]

Off hand I'd lean towards option #1, as it tends to tie up fewer
resources on the server. ASP.NET will only process a certain number of
concurrent requests, and even though that number is configurable it is
hard to tie up threads and connections while waiting around for
"stuff" to finish up or possibly time out.

The disclaimer is, I don't know how many users you need to support, or
how long the 3 asynch processes need to complete, so #1 may not be THE
optimal solution for your web application, but it is a conservative
approach.

 

[Thomas Nielsen]

Hi Scott,

We have a lot of concurrent users. I just thought of a hybrid solution,
where one page can be synchronous and another page can be asynchronous. This
is the scenario:

User submit a payment request
Payment request is rejected or accepted synchronously.
If the payment is accepted, asynchronous processes are started on the
servers and the confirmation is sent to the client.
On the payment confirmation page, there will be a link to
OrderProcessing.aspx.
OrderProcessing.aspx will start polling the asynchronous processes, and stop
polling if all are completed, or if time out.

- Thomas

 

[Scott Allen]

Thomas:

I think your scenario sounds pretty good. It's simple and easy to
debug too.

--s