How to cancel parallel loops in .NET C#

Cancelling parallel loops in C# is similar to cancelling “normal” tasks. You will need to supply a ParallelOptions object to the parallel loop assigning a cancellation token to its CancellationToken property. If you don’t know these objects then make sure to check out the following posts:

• Cancellation token
• Parallel options

When you cancel the cancellation token then no new iterations will be started in a parallel loop. However, those already running will finish. Parallel.For and Parallel.ForEach will then throw an OperationCanceledException.

Declare the cancellation token:

CancellationTokenSource cancellationTokenSource = new CancellationTokenSource();

Create a Task that will cancel the token after 5 seconds:

Task.Factory.StartNew(() =>
{
	Thread.Sleep(5000);
	cancellationTokenSource.Cancel();
	Console.WriteLine("Token cancelled");
});

Define the parallel loop options and assign the cancellation token:

ParallelOptions parallelLoopOptions =
	new ParallelOptions()
	{
		CancellationToken = cancellationTokenSource.Token
	};

Perform some loop that is guaranteed to take more than 5 seconds:

try
{				
	Parallel.For(0, Int64.MaxValue, parallelLoopOptions, index =>
	{
		double result = Math.Pow(index, 3);
		Console.WriteLine("Index {0}, result {1}", index, result);
		Thread.Sleep(100);
	});
}
catch (OperationCanceledException)
{
	Console.WriteLine("Cancellation exception caught!");
}

Run the code and you’ll see that the parallel loop will likely run for slightly more than 5 seconds which is because loops running when the cancellation token is cancelled will be allowed to complete.

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