In the world of workflow automation, efficiency is not just a nice-to-have; it is a fundamental requirement. A single workflow engine instance might need to manage hundreds of concurrent executions, each waiting on I/O, external APIs, or database operations. Today, we explore how Vyshyvanka achieves high-throughput performance using .NET's powerful concurrency model.
The Async-First Architecture
Vyshyvanka was built with an async-first philosophy. We recognized early on that workflow engines are inherently I/O-bound. You are constantly waiting: waiting for a database row to lock, waiting for an API to respond, or waiting for a disk write to confirm.
If we were to use traditional synchronous threads, we would quickly exhaust the thread pool and bring the system to a halt. By using async/await everywhere, we ensure that while a workflow waits for I/O, the underlying thread is returned to the .NET thread pool to handle other work. This allows a relatively small number of threads to manage hundreds of concurrent workflow executions.
Concurrency Control with SemaphoreSlim
