is it possible to let the lock{} or similar structure lock on writes only?

Question

well i mean i have several sections of code that use some variable i want to protect. but the idea is that several threads only read that variable. and only one threads is writing to it and it does that not that frequetly. i want to be able to let multiple threads do reading at the same time and only lock this varialbe when the the writing thread is accessing it.

if i use the normal lock(variable){} construct then all the reading threads will be blocked on each other. so is there a way to do that?

Answer 1

It sounds like you're looking for the ReaderWriterLock class.

ReaderWriterLock is used to synchronize access to a resource. At any given time, it allows either concurrent read access for multiple threads, or write access for a single thread. In a situation where a resource is changed infrequently, a ReaderWriterLock provides better throughput than a simple one-at-a-time lock, such as Monitor.