Question

Often, when I want a class which is thread-safe, I do something like the following:

public class ThreadSafeClass
{
    private readonly object theLock = new object();

    private double propertyA;
    public double PropertyA
    {
        get
        {
            lock (theLock)
            {
                return propertyA;
            }
        }
        set
        {
            lock (theLock)
            {
                propertyA = value;
            }
        }
    }

    private double propertyB;
    public double PropertyB
    {
        get
        {
            lock (theLock)
            {
                return propertyB;
            }
        }
        set
        {
            lock (theLock)
            {
                propertyB = value;
            }
        }
    }

    public void SomeMethod()
    {
        lock (theLock)
        {
            PropertyA = 2.0 * PropertyB;
        }
    }
}

It works, but it is very verbose. Sometimes I even create a lock object for each method and property creating more verbosity and complexity.

I know that it is also possible to lock classes using the Synchronization attribute but I’m not sure how well that scales — as I often expect to have hundreds of thousands, if not millions, of instances of thread-safe objects. This approach would create a synchronization context for every instance of the class, and requires the class to be derived from ContextBoundObject and therefore could not be derived from anything else — since C# doesn’t allow for multiple inheritance — which is a show stopper in many cases.

Edit: As several of the responders have emphasized, there is no “silver bullet” thread-safe class design. I’m just trying to understand if the pattern I’m using is one of the good solutions. Of course the best solution in any particular situation is problem dependent. Several of the answers below contain alternative designs which should be considered.

Edit: Moreover, there is more than one definition of thread safety. For example, in my implementation above, the following code would NOT be thread-safe:

var myObject = new ThreadSafeClass();
myObject.PropertyA++; // NOT thread-safe

So, does the class definition above represent a good approach? If not, what would you recommend for a design with similar behavior which would be thread-safe for a similar set of uses?

Answer 1

There is no “one-size-fits-all” solution to the multi-threading problem. Do some research on creating immutable classes and learn about the different synchronization primitives.

This is an example of a semi-immutable or the-programmers-immutable class .

public class ThreadSafeClass
{
    public double A { get; private set; }
    public double B { get; private set; }
    public double C { get; private set; }

    public ThreadSafeClass(double a, double b, double c)
    {
        A = a;
        B = b;
        C = c;
    }

    public ThreadSafeClass RecalculateA()
    {
        return new ThreadSafeClass(2.0 * B, B, C);
    }
}

This example moves your synchronization code into another class and serializes access to an instance. In reality, you don’t really want more than one thread operating on an object at any given time.

public class ThreadSafeClass
{
    public double PropertyA { get; set; }
    public double PropertyB { get; set; }
    public double PropertyC { get; set; }

    private ThreadSafeClass()
    {

    }

    public void ModifyClass()
    {
        // do stuff
    }

    public class Synchronizer
    {
        private ThreadSafeClass instance = new ThreadSafeClass();
        private readonly object locker = new object();

        public void Execute(Action<ThreadSafeClass> action)
        {
            lock (locker)
            {
                action(instance);
            }
        }

        public T Execute<T>(Func<ThreadSafeClass, T> func)
        {
            lock (locker)
            {
                return func(instance);
            }
        }
    }
}

Here is a quick example of how you would use it. It may seem a little clunky but it allows you to execute many actions on the instance in one go.

var syn = new ThreadSafeClass.Synchronizer();

syn.Execute(inst => { 
    inst.PropertyA = 2.0;
    inst.PropertyB = 2.0;
    inst.PropertyC = 2.0;
});

var a = syn.Execute<double>(inst => {
    return inst.PropertyA + inst.PropertyB;
});