No ConcurrentList<T> in .Net 4.0?
I was thrilled to see the new System.Collections.Concurrent namespace in .Net 4.0, quite nice! I've seen ConcurrentDictionary, ConcurrentQueue, ConcurrentStack, ConcurrentBag and BlockingCollection.
One thing that seems to be mysteriously missing is a ConcurrentList<T>. Do I have to write that myself (or get it off the web :) )?
Am I missing something obvious here?
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
}