Using an HTTPContext across threads

Question

User hits page spawn.aspx which then spawns a half-dozen threads, rendering pages all using

 ((System.Web.IHttpHandler)instance).ProcessRequest(reference to         


        

Answer 1

Since HttpContext is part of the .Net library, I would expect that all static functions are threadsafe but any non-static members are not threadsafe when calling against the same instance of the object. So hopefuly next time you will anticipate that sharing the HttpContext instance across threads would have problems.

Is there a way you can decouple the operations you need to carry out in parallel from the HttpContext? If they are just loading data and writing to CSV format, that code has no necessary dependency on ASP.NET user control or page lifecycle. Once that dependency is removed, you can implement the page with an asynchronous HttpHandler, running the parallel operations during between IHttpHandler.BeginProcessingRequest() and IHttpHandler.EndProcessingRequest().