Queueing workload in C# WCF web service

Question

I have a slow function that processes some input. There will be peak minutes during the day when the function is called a lot. I don't want this to introduce lag on the consumer side. Hence instead of letting this function do its work and then return true I want the function to add the input to a queue and then return true. Then I want the queue to be processed in the background until it is empty.

Can you please advise me the best way to do this in C#?

Here is some example code that I have started to work with:

namespace WCFServiceWebRole1
{
    public class Service1 : IService1
    {
        public bool SlowFunction(string input)
        {
            // Here is a slow function that processes input...
            return true;
        }

    }
}

namespace WCFServiceWebRole1
{
    public class Service1 : IService1
    {
        public bool SlowFunction(string input)
        {
            AddToQueue(input);
            return true;
        }
    }
}

Answer 1

You can use the ConcurrentQueue class in the System.Collections.Concurrent namespace. Here's a link to its description on MSDN . It would make it pretty easy to implement a producer-consumer queue pattern.

Have your SlowFunction methods call Enqueue on the class, and then have a System.Timers.Timer object run a method periodically that does TryDequeue . You might alternatively use System.Threading.Timer or a scheduled task hitting another service call if you have some really weird use case.