Run one method 1000 times in a short period of time

Let's say we are building some public service that grabs the setup of a user (what server, user and pwd he wants to perform the call), logs in into that server and do some processing...

• the process takes about 15 seconds to complete
• each user has a different setup (server/user/pwd), so the process needs to run against each one

if 1000 users tells the system to run the method at 1:00PM

How can I insure that the method is processed in the next 15 minutes?

What should be the correct approach to this little problem?

I'm thinking that I need to do something Asynchronously, and parallel processing could speed up things, maybe throttling the processes, maybe execute 100 calls per each 30 seconds?

I never did something like thi开发者_如何学Pythons and would love to get your feedback on ideas and future problems just to spend 100 hours of work and realize that I took a wrong road :(

Thank you.

added

The only thing to have in consideration is that this should be a 100% web solution.

If one call to your method does not affect the result of another method call (which seems to be the case here), parallel programming seems to be the way to go.

Consider not processing this in the asp.net application directly, but rather placing such requests on a queue and having another process (windows service may be a good candidate here) pulling items off the queue for processing. The windows service can have multiple threads and can pull as many items off the queue at once as there are processing threads available. With an appropriate queuing mechanism, the windows service can run on separate hardware if needed to reach your performance goals.

You can have the original web page query the result using e.g. Ajax to provide the user feedback if that's a requirement.

UPDATE:

Microsoft has recommended a pattern for long running tasks that can be used in a hosted environment.

Well, 1000 * 15 seconds is more than 4 hours, so you can only complete the entire task within the 15 minute time frame if you parallelize the batch.

I would set up a queue and have a sufficient number of threads or processes pull from that queue.

You can define an in-process queue with Queue<T> or out-of-process either with a database table or MSMQ.

If you don't want to write multithreaded code, you can just have a bunch of different processes running on different machines, all pulling from the same queue.

A console application can do this, but a Windows Service is definitely also an alternative.