Short Walks - Object Locking in C#

While playing with Azure Event Hubs, I decided that I wanted to implement a thread locking mechanism that didn’t queue. That is, I want to try and get a lock on the resource, and if it’s currently in use, just forget it and move on. The default behaviour in C# is to wait for the resource. For example, consider my method:

static async Task MyProcedure()
{
    Console.WriteLine($"Test1 {DateTime.Now}");
    await Task.Delay(5000);
    Console.WriteLine($"Test2 {DateTime.Now}");
}

I could execute this 5 times like so:

static async Task Main(string[] args)
{
    Parallel.For(1, 5, (a) =>
    {
        MyProcedure();
    });
 
    Console.ReadLine();
}

If I wanted to lock this (just bear with me and assume that makes sense for a minute), I might do this:

private static object \_lock = new object();        
 
static async Task Main(string[] args)
{
    Parallel.For(1, 5, (a) =>
    {
        //MyProcedure();
        Lock();
    });
 
    Console.ReadLine();
}
 
static void Lock()
{
    Task.Run(() =>
    {
        lock (\_lock)
        {
            MyProcedure().GetAwaiter().GetResult();
        }
    });
}

I re-jigged the code a bit, because you can’t await inside a lock statement, and obviously, just making the method call synchronous would not be locking the asynchronous call.

So now, I’ve successfully made my asynchronous method synchronous. Each execution of `MyProcedure` will happen sequentially, and that’s because `lock` queues the locking calls behind one another.

However, imagine the Event Hub scenario that’s referenced in the post above. I have, for example, a game, and it’s sending a large volume of telemetry up to the cloud. In my particular case, I’m sending a player’s current position. If I have a locking mechanism whereby the locks are queued then I could potentially get behind; and if that happens then, at best, the data sent to the cloud will be outdated and, at worse, it will use up game resources, potentially causing a lag.

After a bit of research, I found an alterntive:

private static object \_lock = new object();        
 
static async Task Main(string[] args)
{
    Parallel.For(1, 5, (a) =>
    {
        //MyProcedure();
        //Lock();
        TestTryEnter();
    });
 
    Console.ReadLine();
}

static async Task TestTryEnter()
{
    bool lockTaken = false;
 
    try
    {
        Monitor.TryEnter(\_lock, 0, ref lockTaken);
 
        if (lockTaken)
        {
            await MyProcedure();                                        
        }
        else
        {
            Console.WriteLine("Could not get lock");
        }
    }
    finally
    {
        if (lockTaken)
        {
            Monitor.Exit(\_lock);
        }
    }
}

So here, I try to get the lock, and if the resource is already locked, I simply give up and go home. There are obviously a very limited number of uses for this; however, my Event Hub scenario, described above, is one of them. Depending on the type of data that you’re transmitting, it may make much more sense to have a go, and if you’re in the middle of another call, simply abandon the current one.