Question

In my code, I want to check whether if a task (in an other thread) is currently running or not.

I was considering using a Dictionary<String, bool>, and checking the boolean value. However, since I don’t know all the possible tasks at startup, I will have to populate this Dictionary on the fly when the task is started for the first time and query it like this:

Boolean status;
if (_tasks.TryGetValue(lockName, out  status))
{
    return status;
}
return false;

Since, instead of having this bool, the mere existence of the entry can be informative, I am considering using Hashset<String> and adding/removing values instead of setting the flag.

return _tasks.Contains(name)

I am wondering which of these two approaches would yield the best results. I expect approximately the same number of write operations than reads.

Answer 1

There won’t be any significant difference.

Both uses a hash lookup to check for the key, which is close to an O(1) operation.