ASP.NET MVC and Ajax, concurrent requests?

Question

AJAX newbie here!
At the moment in my ASP.NET MVC web app my AJAX requests appear to be getting batched or queued, im not sure.
No requests seem to be getting completed until the previous request has finished.
How do I go about getting the requests to return independantly?
I dont necessarily want someone to give me the answer but maybe some links to good tutorials or resources which could help. Thanks

Mantel

Please post the code of the AJAX request and the Controller action that's handling it. – Batsman

Answer 1

I'm expanding on Lachlan Roche's answer, which is correct.

The ASP.NET framework will "single-thread" requests that deal with Session scope (a global resource), to prevent one request from interfering with another. In WebForms I think you can use the Page directive to specify that individual pages don't use Session and therefore don't need to treated synchronously like this.

The problem is that in ASP.NET MVC all requests use Session, because it's used to implement TempData. You can disable session state entirely, as Lachlan Roche pointed out, or you can deal with this on a case-by-case basis.

A possible solution might be to kick off your own background threads to process any long-running code, so that the initial request "completes" as quickly as possible.

Extender

Answer 2

ASP.NET will serially process requests on a per-session basis unless sessions are configured as disabled or read only in web.config via the enableSessionState attribute on the pages element.

As this is a page setting, this will not affect MVC controllers and they will still be subject to serial request processing.

Curiously, even with sessions disabled or set to readonly, we can still read and write session data. It seems to only affect the session locking that causes serial request processing.

<system.web>
    <pages enableSessionState="ReadOnly"/>
</system.web>

Pages can also have an enableSessionState property, though this is not relevant to MVC views.

<%@ Page EnableSessionState="True" %>

Shipentine

Just checked it. Does not work in ASP.NET MVC 5. Even though Session = null, concurrent requests are still sequential. – Blowtorch

Same Problem as Lachlan Roche – Arboriculture

See Andy's answer. This controller attribute worked for me: [SessionState(System.Web.SessionState.SessionStateBehavior.ReadOnly)] – Carrillo

Answer 3

With the release of ASP.MVC 3 you can now add an attribute to your controllers to mark the Session as readonly, which allows actions to be called concurrently from the same client.

Sessionless Controller Support:

Sessionless Controller is another great new feature in ASP.NET MVC 3. With Sessionless Controller you can easily control your session behavior for controllers. For example, you can make your HomeController's Session as Disabled or ReadOnly, allowing concurrent request execution for single user. For details see Concurrent Requests In ASP.NET MVC and HowTo: Sessionless Controller in MVC3 – what & and why?.

- from this DZone article.

By adding SessionState(SessionStateBehaviour.Disabled) to your controller, the runtime will allow you to invoke multiple actions concurrently from the same browser session.

Unfortunately I don't think there is a way to mark an action so as to only disable the session when that action is called, so if you have a controller that has some actions that require the session and others that do not, you will need to move the ones that do not into a separate controller.

In later versions of ASP MVC you can decorate individual controller classes with the SessionStateAttribute

[System.Web.Mvc.SessionState(System.Web.SessionState.SessionStateBehavior.ReadOnly)]
public class MyController : Controller 
{
}

Lennielenno

You can implement your own Action Based Session Management by referring to the following article sapoval.org/per-action-custom-sessionstateattribute – Plasterboard

Just checked it. Does not work in ASP.NET MVC 5. Even though Session = null, concurrent requests are still sequential. – Blowtorch

Please also mention [SessionState(System.Web.SessionState.SessionStateBehavior.ReadOnly)] – Erasure

@PhilippMunin, Just Checked it and the attribute worked for me in asp.net mvc 4. Should also work in 5. The attribute was added back in version 3. – Carrillo

Answer 4

Since .NET Framework v3.0 released, you can use "SessionStateBehavior" enum with SessionStateAttribute:

[SessionState(System.Web.SessionState.SessionStateBehavior.ReadOnly)]
public class MyController : BaseController { }

Bilicki

Answer 5

Well Concurrent Request are more on browser dependent aswell if you fire suppose 10 concurrent request to an action Using AJax in Mozilla and same using IE 8 then you will find that Mozilla has style to fire one request wait for its response and then fire second and so on... for this is one by one basis whereas in IE * this fire about 6 concurrent request at a time to Server.

So Concurrent Request are also dependent on browser type.

Pretorius

Answer 6

I suggest using jQuery for your ajax needs with asp.net mvc, I have used it exclusively and it has been extremely easy.

As for tutorials I would look at this: http://docs.jquery.com/Ajax

There are tons of options to play with and I also suggest downloading firebug so you can watch requests launch from your page asynchronously and see if they fire and what they return etc.

Like the other guy side, AJAX request are asynchronous and don't get queued up and they all return independently when they finish, so if you watch in firebug it will be easy to see what is going on behind the scenes and before the debugger gets hit

Terms

I didn't downvote this, but this isn't accurate: "AJAX request are asynchronous and don't get queued up". While it's true they don't get queued up by the client, the server does in fact queue them up when the session state is enabled. – Davidadavidde