Reader/writer locks and favoritism
Posted by noah on August 20, 2008
Something that I never really considered when using an implementation of reader/writer locks is whether it favors readers, writers, or tries to take a balanced approach. I waited to use this feature in .net until recently since the basic reader/writer was implemented poorly
So 3.5 has ReaderWriterLockSlim, which is really handy, except in my case, it doesn’t work the way I want it to. I’m writing a quote server which requires high read availability. After I implemented ReaderWriterLockSlim, I couldn’t get a read lock in some cases when there was only one other read lock. Turns out that I had one other request for a writer lock pending, which blocked the 2nd read lock.
I read this in the documentation, but I guess it just didn’t click at that time.
minus 10 points for me (and minus 3 hours of my life)
