Breaking parallel loops in .NET C# using the Break method

It’s not uncommon to break the execution of a for/foreach loop using the ‘break’ keyword. A for loop can look through a list of integers and if the loop body finds some matching value then the loop can be exited. It’s another discussion that ‘while’ and ‘do until’ loops might be a better alternative, but there you go.

You cannot simply break out from a parallel loop using the break keyword. However, we can achieve the effect with the ParallelLoopState class. In this post we looked at using the Stop method of the ParallelLoopState class. Here we’ll look at a slightly different method of the same class: Break(). Let’s say we have the following integer array…:

List<int> integers = new List<int>();

for (int i = 0; i <= 100; i++)
{
	integers.Add(i);
}

…and we want to break the loop as soon as we’ve found a number higher than 50. Both Parallel.For() and Parallel.ForEach() accepts an Action of T parameter as we saw before. This Action object has an overloaded version: Action of T and ParallelLoopState. The loop state is created automatically by the Parallel class. The loop state object has a Break method which stops the loop execution. To be more precise: if Break is called in the 5th iteration, then only those iterations will be started afterwards that are required to process items 1-4. Other iterations may have been started by the scheduler of course and they will run complete. So it is guaranteed that at least the first five items will be processed. Break() can even be called multiple times if the processing of multiple items results in breaking the code. In the below example if n separate threads are started with an integer higher than 50 then Break will be called n times:

Parallel.ForEach(integers, (int item, ParallelLoopState state) =>
{
	if (item > 50)
	{
		Console.WriteLine("Higher than 50: {0}, exiting loop.", item);
		state.Break();
	}
	else
	{
		Console.WriteLine("Less than 50: {0}", item);
	}
});

If Break is called more than once then the lowest item will be taken as a boundary by the Parallel class. If Break is called at items 5, 10 and 15 then all iterations required to process items 1-5 will be completed.

View the list of posts on the Task Parallel Library here.