Ensuring Variables Are Atomic or Thread Safe

When multiple threads are writing to the static field you need to make sure that the writing operation is atomic or only one thread can write at a time. One of the ways to ensure you static fields are thread safe is to use Interlocked class part from the System.Threading namespace.

Here is an example of a static cache that does clean up every 1000 saves.

public class QueryCache
{
    //static field that we need to make sure is thread safe
    private static int cacheCount;
    private const int MAX_ITEMS = 1000;
    static readonly System.Collections.Concurrent.ConcurrentDictionary<string, object> _cache = new System.Collections.Concurrent.ConcurrentDictionary<string, object>();
    public static void SaveToCache(string key, object value)
    {
        if(Interlocked.Increment(ref cacheCount) == MAX_ITEMS)
        {
            CleanUpCache();
        }
        _cache[key] = value;
    }
}

Since multiple threads can be writing to the cache at the same time, we have to make sure we don’t have a collision when incrementing a cacheCount file. Interlocked class has some other useful methods like Interlock.Exchange to set the variable to a specific value atomically.