What is the correct PLINQ syntax to convert this foreach loop to parallel execution?

Update 2011-05-20 12:49AM: The foreach is still 25% faster than the parallel solution for my application. And don't use the collection count for max parallelism, use somthing closer to the number of cores on your machine.

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I have an IO bound task that I would like to run in parallel. I want to apply the same operation to every file in a folder. Internally, the operation results in a Dispatcher.Invoke that adds the computed file info to a collection on the UI thread. So, in a sense, the work result is a side effect of the method call, not a value returned directly from the method call.

This is the core loop that I want to run in parallel

foreach (ShellObject sf in sfcoll)
    ProcessShellObject(sf, curExeName);

The context for this loop is here:

        var curExeName = Path.GetFileName(Assembly.GetEntryAssembly().Location);
        using (ShellFileSystemFolder sfcoll = ShellFileSystemFolder.FromFolderPath(_rootPath))
        {
            //This works, but is not parallel.
            foreach (ShellObject sf in sfcoll)
                ProcessShellObject(sf, curExeName);

            //This doesn't work.
            //My attempt at PLINQ.  This code never calls method ProcessShellObject.

            var query = from sf in sfcoll.AsParallel().WithDegreeOfParallelism(sfcoll.Count())
                        let p = ProcessShellObject(sf, curExeName)
                        select p;
        }

    private String ProcessShellObject(ShellObject sf, string curExeName)
    {
        String unusedReturnValueName = sf.ParsingName
        try
        {
            DesktopItem di = new DesktopItem(sf);
            //Up date DesktopItem stuff
            di.PropertyChanged += new PropertyChangedEventHandler(DesktopItem_PropertyChanged);
            Contr开发者_开发百科olWindowHelper.MainWindow.Dispatcher.Invoke(
                (Action)(() => _desktopItemCollection.Add(di)));
        }
        catch (Exception ex)
        {
        }
        return unusedReturnValueName ;
    }

Thanks for any help!

+tom

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EDIT: Regarding the update to your question. I hadn't spotted that the task was IO-bound - and presumably all the files are from a single (traditional?) disk. Yes, that would go slower - because you're introducing contention in a non-parallelizable resource, forcing the disk to seek all over the place.

IO-bound tasks can still be parallelized effectively sometimes - but it depends on whether the resource itself is parallelizable. For example, an SSD (which has much smaller seek times) may completely change the characteristics you're seeing - or if you're fetching over the network from several individually-slow servers, you could be IO-bound but not on a single channel.

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You've created a query, but never used it. The simplest way of forcing everything to be used with the query would be to use Count() or ToList(), or something similar. However, a better approach would be to use Parallel.ForEach:

var options = new ParallelOptions { MaxDegreeOfParallelism = sfcoll.Count() };
Parallel.ForEach(sfcoll, options, sf => ProcessShellObject(sf, curExeName));

I'm not sure that setting the max degree of parallelism like that is the right approach though. It may work, but I'm not sure. A different way of approaching this would be to start all the operations as tasks, specifying TaskCreationOptions.LongRunning.

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Your query object created via LINQ is an IEnumerable. It gets evaluated only if you enumerate it (eg. via foreach loop):

        var query = from sf in sfcoll.AsParallel().WithDegreeOfParallelism(sfcoll.Count())
                    let p = ProcessShellObject(sf, curExeName)
                    select p;
        foreach(var q in query) 
        {
            // ....
        }
        // or:
        var results = query.ToArray(); // also enumerates query

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Should you add a line in the end

var results = query.ToList();