Tag: concurrency

Volatile.Read is an acquire load of one location. Volatile.ReadBarrier, new in .NET 10, is a fence that gives every earlier read acquire semantics. Use Volatile.Read for flags and published references, and ReadBarrier when you need a batch of plain or non-atomic reads to complete before the next memory access, as in a seqlock.

Loading an entity, calling List.Add, and saving rewrites the whole jsonb document and silently loses concurrent appends. Push the append into one UPDATE with the jsonb || operator, either through ExecuteSqlAsync or a mapped function inside ExecuteUpdateAsync, and make it idempotent with a @> guard.

The existence check in your handler is not the guard you think it is. Put a unique index on the inbox table, write the marker in the same SaveChanges as the business change, and let the database pick the winner. Plus the ExecuteUpdate trap that quietly undoes all of it.

EF Core 11 still has no lock API. Here is how to take a real row lock with FromSql: WITH (UPDLOCK, ROWLOCK) on SQL Server, FOR UPDATE on PostgreSQL, the subquery trap that silently widens the lock, NOWAIT and SKIP LOCKED, deadlock retries, and what to do when the row does not exist yet.

The check-then-insert in your handler is not atomic. Catch PostgresException with SqlState 23505, or collapse the whole thing into one INSERT ... ON CONFLICT statement. EnableRetryOnFailure will not help.

A thread shares memory with every other thread in the process. A Dart isolate does not: it owns its heap, runs one event loop, and talks to other isolates only by messages. Here is what that means at the VM level, where isolate groups blur the line, and how it plays out in Flutter, FFI, and on the web.

Add a rowversion concurrency token in EF Core 11: the [Timestamp] and IsRowVersion setup, the SQL EF actually emits, catching DbUpdateConcurrencyException, store-wins vs client-wins vs merge, disconnected APIs with ETags, and the five traps that silently disable the whole thing.

Four ways to guard a critical section in C#, and a decision matrix for picking one. Use System.Threading.Lock for synchronous mutual exclusion on .NET 9+, SemaphoreSlim when the section spans an await, and Monitor only when you need Wait/Pulse.

Three ways to push work onto the thread pool in C#, and which one to reach for. Use Task.Run for almost everything, ThreadPool.QueueUserWorkItem<TState> for allocation-free fire-and-forget, and Task.Factory.StartNew only for LongRunning or a custom scheduler.

When async/await is not enough: spawn a Dart isolate to run CPU-bound work off the UI thread. Isolate.run, Flutter's compute, long-lived workers with SendPort/ReceivePort, what can cross the boundary, and the JS/web caveat. Tested on Dart 3.11 and Flutter 3.27.1.