Track progress when using TPL's Parallel.ForEach

Madu Alikor picture Madu Alikor · Jan 26, 2013 · Viewed 11k times · Source

What is the best way way to track progress in the following

long total = Products.LongCount();
long current = 0;
double Progress = 0.0;

Parallel.ForEach(Products, product =>
{
    try
    {
        var price = GetPrice(SystemAccount, product);
        SavePrice(product,price);
    }
    finally
    {
        Interlocked.Decrement(ref this.current);
    }});

I want to update the progress variable from 0.0 to 1.0 (current/total) but i don't want to use anything that would have an adverse effect on the parallelism.

Answer

svick picture svick · Jan 26, 2013

Jon's solution is good, if you need simple synchronization like this, your first attempt should almost always use lock. But if you measure that the locking slows things too much, you should think about using something like Interlocked.

In this case, I would use Interlocked.Increment to increment the current count, and change Progress into a property:

private long total;
private long current;
public double Progress
{
    get
    {
        if (total == 0)
            return 0;
        return (double)current / total;
    }
}

…

this.total = Products.LongCount();
this.current = 0;

Parallel.ForEach(Products, product =>
{
    try
    {
        var price = GetPrice(SystemAccount, product);
        SavePrice(product, price);
    }
    finally
    {
        Interlocked.Increment(ref this.current);
    }
});

Also, you might want to consider what to do with exceptions, I'm not sure that iterations that ended with an exception should be counted as done.