Locking pattern for proper use of .NET MemoryCache

Question

I assume this code has concurrency issues:

const string CacheKey = \"CacheKey\";
static string GetCachedData()
{
    string expensiveString =null;
    if (Me         


        

Answer 1

To avoid the global lock, you can use SingletonCache to implement one lock per key, without exploding memory usage (the lock objects are removed when no longer referenced, and acquire/release is thread safe guaranteeing that only 1 instance is ever in use via compare and swap).

Using it looks like this:

SingletonCache keyLocks = new SingletonCache();

const string CacheKey = "CacheKey";
static string GetCachedData()
{
    string expensiveString =null;
    if (MemoryCache.Default.Contains(CacheKey))
    {
        return MemoryCache.Default[CacheKey] as string;
    }

    // double checked lock
    using (var lifetime = keyLocks.Acquire(url))
    {
        lock (lifetime.Value)
        {
           if (MemoryCache.Default.Contains(CacheKey))
           {
              return MemoryCache.Default[CacheKey] as string;
           }

           cacheItemPolicy cip = new CacheItemPolicy()
           {
              AbsoluteExpiration = new DateTimeOffset(DateTime.Now.AddMinutes(20))
           };
           expensiveString = SomeHeavyAndExpensiveCalculation();
           MemoryCache.Default.Set(CacheKey, expensiveString, cip);
           return expensiveString;
        }
    }      
}

Code is here on GitHub: https://github.com/bitfaster/BitFaster.Caching

Install-Package BitFaster.Caching

There is also an LRU implementation that is lighter weight than MemoryCache, and has several advantages - faster concurrent reads and writes, bounded size, no background thread, internal perf counters etc. (disclaimer, I wrote it).