When will ConcurrentDictionary TryRemove return false

Question

Will it only return false if the dictionary does not contain a value for the given key or will it also return false due to thread race conditions, like another thread adds/u

Answer 1

The ConcurrentDictionary does not suffer from race conditions. That's why you use it.

Return Value

true if an object was removed successfully; otherwise, false.

Answer 2

One other point to make:

// This might fail if another thread is adding with key value of 1.
cd.TryAdd(1, "one"); 

This comment is incorrect and possibly suffers from the same misconception about what it means to 'try'. It's not about a concurrent attempt to add, it's whether a value has already been added with key 1.

Consider a standard Dictionary<TKey,TValue>. The equivalent code would be:

if (!d.Contains(1))
    d.Add(1, "one");

This requires two operations. There's no way to design such an API to be threadsafe, as cd might have a value with key 1 added between the call to Contains and Add, which would then result in Add throwing.

The concurrent collections have APIs that logically bundle these test-and-do pairs into single atomic operations, behind a single API.

Answer 3

While Mitch is right that a ConcurrentDictionary is not vulnerable to race conditions, I think the answer to the question you are asking is that yes, if the key is present, TryRemove will work and will return true.

In the code you posted, there's no way that TryRemove would return false since cd is a local variable not accessed anywhere else. But if some code elsewhere were given a reference to this ConcurrentDictionary object and were removing keys on a separate thread, then it's possible that TryRemove could return false, even here -- but only because the key was already removed, not because some other action is being performed on the dictionary and the key is somehow "stuck" there.