Async Versus Sync Code in ASP.NET APIs

Background

If you're just looking for the code, it's here: https://github.com/dahlsailrunner/async-vs-sync

I have recently been doing more work relative to performance, and one of the things I wanted to more specifically test and quantify with concrete results was differences between async and synchronous code (I'll use "async" to refer to asynchronous code and "synchronous" as the other word because the long (or short) words together are almost the same). NBomber is a great .NET-based load testing package that makes this testing pretty straighforward.

A Simple API

I created a simple API project that uses EF Core and a SQLite database.

There are two controller actions on the API:

• GET /Products: async for everything
• GET /SyncProducts: syncrhonous for everything

I also added a 400-millisecond "sleep" to each operation - the async version uses await Task.Delay and the synchronous version uses Thread.Sleep.

Here is the repository code that gets the data:

 1public async Task<List<Product>> GetProductListAsync(string category)
 2{
 3    await Task.Delay(400); // simulates heavy query
 4    return await _ctx.Products.Where(p => p.Category == category || category == "all")
 5        .ToListAsync();
 6}
 7
 8public List<Product> GetProductList(string category)
 9{
10    Thread.Sleep(400); // simulates heavy query
11    return _ctx.Products.Where(p => p.Category == category || category == "all")
12        .ToList();
13}

Basic Results

It might not surprise you that if you just run these different endpoints from the Swagger UI, they behave about the same - taking about a half-second each.

It's only when we can generate some load / concurrency against the API that we should see some differences in performance.

Using NBomber for Performance Tests

NBomber is a great package for creating simple performance tests and can simulate load using different models.

A basic Scenario in NBomber might look something like this:

 1var asyncHttpClient = new HttpClient();
 2var asyncScenario = Scenario.Create("ASYNC requests", async context =>
 3{
 4    var requestParameter = ApiParams.GetNextItem(context.ScenarioInfo);
 5
 6    var request = Http.CreateRequest("GET", $"{BaseUrl}/Product?Category={requestParameter}");
 7
 8    var clientArgs = new HttpClientArgs(
 9        httpCompletion: HttpCompletionOption.ResponseContentRead,
10        cancellationToken: CancellationToken.None
11    );
12
13    return await Http.Send(asyncHttpClient, clientArgs, request);
14});

There are different ways to provide an HttpClient and my method above is a pretty simple one. But then you can basically just set up the HTTP request you want to make and use the HttpClientArgs to indicate what "complete" means to the test of each scenario. In the above example I want to have read all of the content.

And note this line:

1var requestParameter = ApiParams.GetNextItem(context.ScenarioInfo);

The above code uses the very handy DataFeed functionality within NBomber to get a random query string parameter from a list I set up for the DataFeed:

1private static readonly IDataFeed<string> ApiParams = DataFeed.Random(new List<string> { "all", "boots", "equip", "kayak" });

Then you can set up the "load simulation" using the fluent API syntax; an example is shown here:

1asyncScenario = asyncScenario.WithLoadSimulations(Simulation.Inject(rate: 100, interval: TimeSpan.FromSeconds(1), during: TimeSpan.FromSeconds(30)));

The code above will create 100 new requests each second for a duration of 30 seconds, meaning 3,000 requests will be made over the course of the 30 seconds. Other patterns exist - you can ramp up or down, wait for a warm-up period, and more. Check the docs mentioned above.

Results

The results are pretty remarkable. Note specifically the latency and latency percentile values in the tables below - first for the synchronous test and second for the async one.

For the p50 latency percentile, almost 14 seconds for the synchronous code, and only 410 milliseconds for the async version of the same!

Synchronous Results

load simulations:

• inject, rate: 100, interval: 00:00:01, during: 00:00:30

Async Results

load simulations:

• inject, rate: 100, interval: 00:00:01, during: 00:00:30

Feel free to experiment with this simple repo and its tests on your own. For example, see if you can find the point at which the async code in this code becomes noticeably better than the synchronous version!

As noted above, the full working code is here: https://github.com/dahlsailrunner/async-vs-sync

Happy coding!