Implementing thread safety in LIFTI

Share on:

I’ve wanted to get a bit of thread-safety going in LIFTI for a little while now because one of the my target scenarios was for the index to be hosted in a website.

The index is already thread safe for concurrent reads, but it would definitely be a really bad thing if we started mixing concurrent writes with our reads, not least because LIFTI makes heavy use of the generic Dictionary class. (The Thread Safety section of the documentation specifically calls this out)

Given that concurrent reads are ok, using a ReaderWriterLockSlim (RWLS from now on) instance to synchronize access to the index would seem to be a good idea. The basic premise to the RWLS class is:

  • Multiple threads can simultaneously obtain read locks.
  • Only one thread at a time can obtain a write lock.
  • If a write lock is requested while there are pending locks on other threads, it will block until the pending locks are released.
  • Any read locks that are requested while a write lock is pending are blocked until the write lock is released, at which time they are all granted.

Adding the ReaderWriterLockSlim to the index

A very simplistic approach to this would be to just keep an instance of RWLS in the FullTextIndex class, but that will lead to fairly verbose code in quite a few places, like this:

 1
 2this.readerWriterLock.AcquireWriterLock();
 3try
 4{
 5    this.IndexItem(itemKey, this.IndexText(itemKey));
 6}
 7finally
 8{
 9    this.readerWriterLock.ReleaseWriterLock();
10}

I also wanted to support the disabling of the locking process - but would mean making the code even messier than it already was.

Looking at the try…finally block I was reminded of something else - it’s pretty much what the using block gets compiled down to when you use a disposable object. With that in mind, the code would ideally be:

1
2using (this.LockManager.AcquireWriteLock())
3{
4    this.IndexItem(itemKey, this.IndexText(itemKey));
5}

It’s no co-incidence then, that this is what the final implementation of the code looks like!

Introducing LockManager

In keeping with the replaceable part philosophy of LIFTI there is a new property on FullTextIndex called LockManager that accepts anything implementing ILockManager:

 1
 2public interface ILockManager
 3{
 4    /// <summary>
 5    /// Gets or sets a value indicating whether locking is enabled.
 6    /// </summary>
 7    /// <value><c>true</c> if enabled; otherwise, <c>false</c>.</value>
 8    bool Enabled { get; set; }
 9
10    /// <summary>
11    /// Obtains a read lock. This will remain active until the 
12    /// provided lock is disposed.
13    /// </summary>
14    /// <returns>An instance of <see cref="ILock"/> 
15    /// that represents the read lock.</returns>
16    ILock AcquireReadLock();
17
18    /// <summary>
19    /// Obtains a write lock. This will remain active until the 
20    /// provided lock is disposed.
21    /// </summary>
22    /// <returns>An instance of <see cref="ILock"/> 
23    /// that represents the write lock.</returns>
24    ILock AcquireWriteLock();
25}

Both methods return an instance of ILock, which is about as minimalist as an interface comes - the key point being that it enforces that a class that implements it also implements IDisposable:

1
2public interface ILock : IDisposable
3{
4}

I’ll admit this looks odd, and FXCop complains about it (CA1040 - Define a custom attribute to replace ILock), but I think in this case it’s justifiable as it makes the return type of the methods more explicit.

So now we have the interface, I’ll walk through the implementation of AcquireReadLock (AcquireWriteLock is almost identical).

 1
 2public ILock AcquireReadLock()
 3{
 4    if (this.Enabled)
 5    {
 6        // Enter the lock
 7        this.readerWriterLock.EnterReadLock();
 8
 9        // Return a read lock instance
10        return new ReadLock(this);
11    }
12
13    // Locking is not enabled, so return a new disposable 
14    // null lock that does nothing
15    return new NullLock();
16}

Assuming the lock manager is enabled, a call to EnterReadLock on the class-level RWLS instance is made. This will either block the thread while other locks are processed, or grant the lock immediately. Either way, once the call returns, a new instance of ReadLock is returned. (I’ll come back to ReadLock very shortly)

However, if the lock manager isn’t enabled, all that happens is a new NullLock instance is returned. NullLock doesn’t do anything, even when it is disposed by the caller, so is essentially a no-op. This is great because if the lock manager is disabled, then the calling code can remain blissfully unaware.

ReadLock

Here’s the full ReadLock implementation:

 1
 2internal struct ReadLock : ILock
 3{
 4    private readonly LockManager lockManager;
 5
 6    internal ReadLock(LockManager lockManager)
 7    {
 8        this.lockManager = lockManager;
 9    }
10
11    public void Dispose()
12    {
13        this.lockManager.ReleaseReadLock();
14    }
15}

So when a ReadLock instance is disposed, an internal method ReleaseReadLock is called on the instance of the lock manager that was passed into the constructor - ReleaseReadLock looks like this:

1
2internal void ReleaseReadLock()
3{
4    this.readerWriterLock.ExitReadLock();
5}

Awesome, so that’s the round trip completed. Locks are created at the beginning of a using statement, and released when they are disposed automatically at the end.

Disposable Structs

One final note: you might have noticed that ReadLock is a struct, not a class - this is true for all the current ILock implementations. Doing this prevents an extra object being created on the heap, and reduces the amount of work the GC would have to do.