Doing locking in ASP.NET correctly

Question

I have an ASP.NET site with a fairly slow search function, and I want to improve performance by adding the results to the cache for one hour using the query as the cache-key

Answer 1

Unless you're absolutely certain that it's critical to have no redundant queries then I would avoid locking altogether. The ASP.NET cache is inherently thread-safe, so the only drawback to the following code is that you might temporarily see a few redundant queries racing each other when their associated cache entry expires:

public static string DoSearch(string query)
{
    var results = (string)HttpContext.Current.Cache[query];
    if (results == null)
    {
        results = GetResultsFromSlowDb(query);

        HttpContext.Current.Cache.Insert(query, results, null,
            DateTime.Now.AddHours(1), Cache.NoSlidingExpiration);
    }
    return results;
}

If you decide that you really must avoid all redundant queries then you could use a set of more granular locks, one lock per query:

public static string DoSearch(string query)
{
    var results = (string)HttpContext.Current.Cache[query];
    if (results == null)
    {
        object miniLock = _miniLocks.GetOrAdd(query, k => new object());
        lock (miniLock)
        {
            results = (string)HttpContext.Current.Cache[query];
            if (results == null)
            {
                results = GetResultsFromSlowDb(query);

                HttpContext.Current.Cache.Insert(query, results, null,
                    DateTime.Now.AddHours(1), Cache.NoSlidingExpiration);
            }

            object temp;
            if (_miniLocks.TryGetValue(query, out temp) && (temp == miniLock))
                _miniLocks.TryRemove(query);
        }
    }
    return results;
}

private static readonly ConcurrentDictionary _miniLocks =
                                  new ConcurrentDictionary();