Threading Tips: Never Lock a Value Type. Never Lock "This"

UPDATE: As a commenter pointed out, the original code example did not properly demonstrate the problem with locking on the this keyword within a normal method. I have corrected this example and wrote a better example that demonstrates that this problem still exists even in a “normal” method.

Take a look at this code:

private bool isDisposed = false;
 
//... code...
~MyClass()
{
    lock(isDisposed)
    {
        if(!isDisposed)
        {
            //Do Stuff...
        }
    }
}

Hopefully you can see the problem here right away. The lock statement takes an object instance as a parameter. So what happens to the boolean isDisposed within the lock statement? That’s right! It gets boxed, meaning a new object instance is allocated and passed to the lock statement. Thus every time you lock on a value type, you’re locking on a new object.

Ok, so let’s try to fix this up a bit.

private bool isDisposed = false;
 
//... code...
~MyClass()
{
    lock(this)
    {
        if(!isDisposed)
        {
            //Do Stuff...
        }
    }
}

So is there anything wrong with this? You’ve probably seen the Microsoft examples locking on this. Well never give full trust to example code (especially as it’s unlikely you’ll add the code to the GAC) ;). Suppose this snippet is from a class MyClass. What do you think will happen with the following code:

MyClass instance = new MyClass();

Monitor.Enter(instance);
instance = null;

GC.Collect();
GC.WaitForPendingFinalizers();

You guessed it! Deadlock.

Every time you lock a .NET object, the runtime associates a SyncBlock structure to that object. Locking works by checking who owns an object’s SyncBlock when attempting to acquire a lock. Thus in the code sample above, the client code and the Dispose() Method are attempting to lock on the same object.

For a more in-depth discussion, I highly recommend Jeffrey Richter’s article Safe Thread Synchronization which is where I first learned about this subtle threading issue.

Likewise you might also take a look at Dr Gui’s Don’t Lock Type Objects post.