Non blocking locking

Question

I want to start some new threads each for one repeating operation. But when such an operation is already in progress, I want to discard the current task. In my scenario I ne

Answer 1

One option would be to work with a reentrancy sentinel:

You could define an int field (initialize with 0) and update it via Interlocked.Increment on entering the method and only proceed if it is 1. At the end just do a Interlocked.Decrement.

Another option:

From your description it seems that you have a Producer-Consumer-Scenario...

For this case it might be helpful to use something like BlockingCollection as it is thread-safe and mostly lock-free...

Another option would be to use ConcurrentQueue or ConcurrentStack...