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Performance Quiz #10 -- Thread local storage

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It's time for another quiz!

A very short one this time.  If I need some thread local storage and I might need several entries should I use:

Thread.GetData(slot) and Thread.SetData(slot, object)

or should I make my own static member like this

 [ThreadStatic]
 static Dictionary<String,Object> myItems = new Dictionary<String,Object>;

and get things through the dictionary?

Warning: spoilers below in the comments ... already :)  Maybe my quizzes are too easy :)

Comments

  • Anonymous
    June 16, 2006
    Hi Rico,

    I think you should use the second attributed variant. Thread.GetData takes a process wide lock if I remember right which is a know scalability issue of .NET 2.0.

    Full Post is here: http://72.14.221.104/search?q=cache:czogGnWiI20J:blogs.gotdotnet.com/junfeng/comments/508423.aspx+%22junfeng%22+Thread.GetData&hl=de&gl=de&ct=clnk&cd=1


    By the way I find the .NET Trace class has some design flaws in terms of performance and reliablity: http://geekswithblogs.net/akraus1/articles/81629.aspx

    Yours,
     Alois Kraus
  • Anonymous
    June 16, 2006
    Regardless of the bug I did mention above I think it is better to get the reference to the TLS data only once since it does cost more than a simple array/Hashtable access.
  • Anonymous
    June 16, 2006
    I'm going to have to add a spoilers warning now :)
  • Anonymous
    June 16, 2006
    Since your quiz was anounced as short I thought my answer could also be short and concise ;-).
    By the way Greg Young has some really great answers to very tricky  questions regarding for loops and JIT optimizations at assembly (not MSIL) level:

    http://codebetter.com/blogs/gregyoung/archive/2006/06/11/146343.aspx

    Your blog is a great resource to advance my still incomplete knowledge about .NET. But it seems I have already made some progress ;-).

    Yours,
     Alois Kraus
  • Anonymous
    June 18, 2006
    And yet the Win32 TLS APIs do not take a global lock. Or at least, they shouldn't need to: certainly Wines implementation of it doesn't and neither does ELF TLS. So what went wrong here?
  • Anonymous
    June 19, 2006
    According to the MSDN documentation, you shouldn't use inline initializers with static variables that bear the [ThreadStatic] attribute.

    From the MSDN entry:

    "Do not specify initial values for fields marked with ThreadStaticAttribute, because such initialization occurs only once, when the class constructor executes, and therefore affects only one thread."
  • Anonymous
    July 18, 2006
    I actually posted quiz #10 quite a while ago but a comment with the correct solution came in so quickly...
  • Anonymous
    December 21, 2006
    I actually posted quiz #10 quite a while ago but a comment with the correct solution came in so quickly