José M. Pérez

December 24, 2010 | Reading Time: ~1 mins

AsyncController: Server-side parallelism

I usually face asynchronous WPO from the browser side, for instance making async requests to include Javascript files or AJAX-requesting any other content.

Today I have come across a feature that has been around since ASP.Net MVC 2 and that allows Asynchronous processing of controller actions. It is nicely explained on Using an Asynchronous Controller in ASP.NET MVC on MSDN website.

It is very useful on long-running requests, since it avoids thread-blocking while the request is being processed. In addition, it exposes AsyncManager, that can be used to increase parallelism in an action by splitting the execution of independent operations.