No ConcurrentList<T> in .Net 4.0?

Question

I gave it a try a while back (also: on GitHub). My implementation had some problems, which I won't get into here. Let me tell you, more importantly, what I learned.

Firstly, there's no way you're going to get a full implementation of IList<T> that is lockless and thread-safe. In particular, random insertions and removals are not going to work, unless you also forget about O(1) random access (i.e., unless you "cheat" and just use some sort of linked list and let the indexing suck).

What I thought might be worthwhile was a thread-safe, limited subset of IList<T>: in particular, one that would allow an Add and provide random read-only access by index (but no Insert, RemoveAt, etc., and also no random write access).

This was the goal of my ConcurrentList<T> implementation. But when I tested its performance in multithreaded scenarios, I found that simply synchronizing adds to a List<T> was faster. Basically, adding to a List<T> is lightning fast already; the complexity of the computational steps involved is miniscule (increment an index and assign to an element in an array; that's really it). You would need a ton of concurrent writes to see any sort of lock contention on this; and even then, the average performance of each write would still beat out the more expensive albeit lockless implementation in ConcurrentList<T>.

In the relatively rare event that the list's internal array needs to resize itself, you do pay a small cost. So ultimately I concluded that this was the one niche scenario where an add-only ConcurrentList<T> collection type would make sense: when you want guaranteed low overhead of adding an element on every single call (so, as opposed to an amortized performance goal).

It's simply not nearly as useful a class as you would think.

What would you use a ConcurrentList for?

The concept of a Random Access container in a threaded world isn't as useful as it may appear. The statement

  if (i < MyConcurrentList.Count)  
      x = MyConcurrentList[i]; 

as a whole would still not be thread-safe.

Instead of creating a ConcurrentList, try to build solutions with what's there. The most common classes are the ConcurrentBag and especially the BlockingCollection.

With all due respect to the great answers provided already, there are times that I simply want a thread-safe IList. Nothing advanced or fancy. Performance is important in many cases but at times that just isn't a concern. Yes, there are always going to be challenges without methods like "TryGetValue" etc, but most cases I just want something that I can enumerate without needing to worry about putting locks around everything. And yes, somebody can probably find some "bug" in my implementation that might lead to a deadlock or something (I suppose) but lets be honest: When it comes to multi-threading, if you don't write your code correctly, it is going deadlock anyway. With that in mind I decided to make a simple ConcurrentList implementation that provides these basic needs.

And for what its worth: I did a basic test of adding 10,000,000 items to regular List and ConcurrentList and the results were:

List finished in: 7793 milliseconds. Concurrent finished in: 8064 milliseconds.

public class ConcurrentList<T> : IList<T>, IDisposable
{
    #region Fields
    private readonly List<T> _list;
    private readonly ReaderWriterLockSlim _lock;
    #endregion

    #region Constructors
    public ConcurrentList()
    {
        this._lock = new ReaderWriterLockSlim(LockRecursionPolicy.NoRecursion);
        this._list = new List<T>();
    }

    public ConcurrentList(int capacity)
    {
        this._lock = new ReaderWriterLockSlim(LockRecursionPolicy.NoRecursion);
        this._list = new List<T>(capacity);
    }

    public ConcurrentList(IEnumerable<T> items)
    {
        this._lock = new ReaderWriterLockSlim(LockRecursionPolicy.NoRecursion);
        this._list = new List<T>(items);
    }
    #endregion

    #region Methods
    public void Add(T item)
    {
        try
        {
            this._lock.EnterWriteLock();
            this._list.Add(item);
        }
        finally
        {
            this._lock.ExitWriteLock();
        }
    }

    public void Insert(int index, T item)
    {
        try
        {
            this._lock.EnterWriteLock();
            this._list.Insert(index, item);
        }
        finally
        {
            this._lock.ExitWriteLock();
        }
    }

    public bool Remove(T item)
    {
        try
        {
            this._lock.EnterWriteLock();
            return this._list.Remove(item);
        }
        finally
        {
            this._lock.ExitWriteLock();
        }
    }

    public void RemoveAt(int index)
    {
        try
        {
            this._lock.EnterWriteLock();
            this._list.RemoveAt(index);
        }
        finally
        {
            this._lock.ExitWriteLock();
        }
    }

    public int IndexOf(T item)
    {
        try
        {
            this._lock.EnterReadLock();
            return this._list.IndexOf(item);
        }
        finally
        {
            this._lock.ExitReadLock();
        }
    }

    public void Clear()
    {
        try
        {
            this._lock.EnterWriteLock();
            this._list.Clear();
        }
        finally
        {
            this._lock.ExitWriteLock();
        }
    }

    public bool Contains(T item)
    {
        try
        {
            this._lock.EnterReadLock();
            return this._list.Contains(item);
        }
        finally
        {
            this._lock.ExitReadLock();
        }
    }

    public void CopyTo(T[] array, int arrayIndex)
    {
        try
        {
            this._lock.EnterReadLock();
            this._list.CopyTo(array, arrayIndex);
        }
        finally
        {
            this._lock.ExitReadLock();
        }
    }

    public IEnumerator<T> GetEnumerator()
    {
        return new ConcurrentEnumerator<T>(this._list, this._lock);
    }

    IEnumerator IEnumerable.GetEnumerator()
    {
        return new ConcurrentEnumerator<T>(this._list, this._lock);
    }

    ~ConcurrentList()
    {
        this.Dispose(false);
    }

    public void Dispose()
    {
        this.Dispose(true);
    }

    private void Dispose(bool disposing)
    {
        if (disposing)
            GC.SuppressFinalize(this);

        this._lock.Dispose();
    }
    #endregion

    #region Properties
    public T this[int index]
    {
        get
        {
            try
            {
                this._lock.EnterReadLock();
                return this._list[index];
            }
            finally
            {
                this._lock.ExitReadLock();
            }
        }
        set
        {
            try
            {
                this._lock.EnterWriteLock();
                this._list[index] = value;
            }
            finally
            {
                this._lock.ExitWriteLock();
            }
        }
    }

    public int Count
    {
        get
        {
            try
            {
                this._lock.EnterReadLock();
                return this._list.Count;
            }
            finally
            {
                this._lock.ExitReadLock();
            }
        }
    }

    public bool IsReadOnly
    {
        get { return false; }
    }
    #endregion
}

    public class ConcurrentEnumerator<T> : IEnumerator<T>
{
    #region Fields
    private readonly IEnumerator<T> _inner;
    private readonly ReaderWriterLockSlim _lock;
    #endregion

    #region Constructor
    public ConcurrentEnumerator(IEnumerable<T> inner, ReaderWriterLockSlim @lock)
    {
        this._lock = @lock;
        this._lock.EnterReadLock();
        this._inner = inner.GetEnumerator();
    }
    #endregion

    #region Methods
    public bool MoveNext()
    {
        return _inner.MoveNext();
    }

    public void Reset()
    {
        _inner.Reset();
    }

    public void Dispose()
    {
        this._lock.ExitReadLock();
    }
    #endregion

    #region Properties
    public T Current
    {
        get { return _inner.Current; }
    }

    object IEnumerator.Current
    {
        get { return _inner.Current; }
    }
    #endregion
}

The reason why there is no ConcurrentList is because it fundamentally cannot be written. The reason why is that several important operations in IList rely on indices, and that just plain won't work. For example:

int catIndex = list.IndexOf("cat");
list.Insert(catIndex, "dog");

The effect that the author is going after is to insert "dog" before "cat", but in a multithreaded environment, anything can happen to the list between those two lines of code. For example, another thread might do list.RemoveAt(0), shifting the entire list to the left, but crucially, catIndex will not change. The impact here is that the Insert operation will actually put the "dog" after the cat, not before it.

The several implementations that you see offered as "answers" to this question are well-meaning, but as the above shows, they don't offer reliable results. If you really want list-like semantics in a multithreaded environment, you can't get there by putting locks inside the list implementation methods. You have to ensure that any index you use lives entirely inside the context of the lock. The upshot is that you can use a List in a multithreaded environment with the right locking, but the list itself cannot be made to exist in that world.

If you think you need a concurrent list, there are really just two possibilities:

1. What you really need is a ConcurrentBag
2. You need to create your own collection, perhaps implemented with a List and your own concurrency control.

If you have a ConcurrentBag and are in a position where you need to pass it as an IList, then you have a problem, because the method you're calling has specified that they might try to do something like I did above with the cat & dog. In most worlds, what that means is that the method you're calling is simply not built to work in a multi-threaded environment. That means you either refactor it so that it is or, if you can't, you're going to have to handle it very carefully. You you'll almost certainly be required to create your own collection with its own locks, and call the offending method within a lock.

ConcurrentList (as a resizeable array, not a linked list) is not easy to write with nonblocking operations. Its API doesn't translate well to a "concurrent" version.

In cases where reads greatly outnumber writes, or (however frequent) writes are non-concurrent, a copy-on-write approach may be appropriate.

The implementation shown below is

• lockless
• blazingly fast for concurrent reads, even while concurrent modifications are ongoing - no matter how long they take
• because "snapshots" are immutable, lockless atomicity is possible, i.e. var snap = _list; snap[snap.Count - 1]; will never (well, except for an empty list of course) throw, and you also get thread-safe enumeration with snapshot semantics for free.. how I LOVE immutability!
• implemented generically, applicable to any data structure and any type of modification
• dead simple, i.e. easy to test, debug, verify by reading the code
• usable in .Net 3.5

For copy-on-write to work, you have to keep your data structures effectively immutable, i.e. no one is allowed to change them after you made them available to other threads. When you want to modify, you

1. clone the structure
2. make modifications on the clone
3. atomically swap in the reference to the modified clone

Code

static class CopyOnWriteSwapper
{
    public static void Swap<T>(ref T obj, Func<T, T> cloner, Action<T> op)
        where T : class
    {
        while (true)
        {
            var objBefore = Volatile.Read(ref obj);
            var newObj = cloner(objBefore);
            op(newObj);
            if (Interlocked.CompareExchange(ref obj, newObj, objBefore) == objBefore)
                return;
        }
    }
}

Usage

CopyOnWriteSwapper.Swap(ref _myList,
    orig => new List<string>(orig),
    clone => clone.Add("asdf"));

If you need more performance, it will help to ungenerify the method, e.g. create one method for every type of modification (Add, Remove, ...) you want, and hard code the function pointers cloner and op.

N.B. #1 It is your responsibility to make sure the no one modifies the (supposedly) immutable data structure. There's nothing we can do in a generic implementation to prevent that, but when specializing to List<T>, you could guard against modification using List.AsReadOnly()

N.B. #2 Be careful about the values in the list. The copy on write approach above guards their list membership only, but if you'd put not strings, but some other mutable objects in there, you have to take care of thread safety (e.g. locking). But that is orthogonal to this solution and e.g. locking of the mutable values can be easily used without issues. You just need to be aware of it.

N.B. #3 If your data structure is huge and you modify it frequently, the copy-all-on-write approach might be prohibitive both in terms of memory consumption and the CPU cost of copying involved. In that case, you might want to use MS's Immutable Collections instead.