Can an ASP.NET worker thread handle multiple requests at once?

Question

I know that ASP.NET will execute a request on a single thread from a pool. Is the inverse true? Will a single ASP.NET request exclusively hold a worker thread until the request completes, or will ASP.NET re-use the same thread between multiple concurrent requests?

Answer 1

Even your first statement is not entirely true.

ASP.NET can exhibit thread agility - different parts of a request's lifecycle can (in some cases - usually if some requests are long-running, I believe, or if you're responding asynchronously) run in different threads. See this article ( archived ) for more information. Unfortunately I haven't seen very much in the way of clear, unambiguous and authoritative documentation on this topic :(