.NET List Thread-Safe Implementation Suggestion needed
- by Bamboo
.Net List class isn't thread safe. I hope to achieve the minimal lock needed and yet still fulfilling the requirement such that as for reading, phantom record is allowed, and for writing, they must be thread-safe so there won't be any lost updates.
So I have something like
public static List<string> list = new List<string>();
In Methods that have **List.Add**/**List.Remove** , I always lock to assure thread safety
lock (lockHelper)
{
list.Add(obj);
or list.Remove(obj);
}
In Methods that requires **List Reading** I don't care about phantom record so I go ahead to read without any locking. In this case. Return a bool by checking whether a string had been added.
if (list.Count() != 0) {
return list.Contains("some string")
}
All I did was locking write accesses, and allow read accesses to go through without any locking. Is my thread safety idea valid?
I understand there is List size expansion. Will it be ok? My guess is that when a List is expanding, it may uses a temp. list. This is ok becasue the temp list size will always have a boundary, and .Net class is well implemented, ie. there shouldn't be any indexOutOfBound or circular reference problems when reading was caught in updates.
