Asynchronous locking based on a key

As the other answerer noted, the original code is removing the SemaphoreSlim from the ConcurrentDictionary before it releases the semaphore. So, you’ve got too much semaphore churn going on – they’re being removed from the dictionary when they could still be in use (not acquired, but already retrieved from the dictionary).

The problem with this kind of “mapping lock” is that it’s difficult to know when the semaphore is no longer necessary. One option is to never dispose the semaphores at all; that’s the easy solution, but may not be acceptable in your scenario. Another option – if the semaphores are actually related to object instances and not values (like strings) – is to attach them using ephemerons; however, I believe this option would also not be acceptable in your scenario.

So, we do it the hard way. 🙂

There are a few different approaches that would work. I think it makes sense to approach it from a reference-counting perspective (reference-counting each semaphore in the dictionary). Also, we want to make the decrement-count-and-remove operation atomic, so I just use a single lock (making the concurrent dictionary superfluous):

public sealed class AsyncDuplicateLock
{
  private sealed class RefCounted<T>
  {
    public RefCounted(T value)
    {
      RefCount = 1;
      Value = value;
    }

    public int RefCount { get; set; }
    public T Value { get; private set; }
  }

  private static readonly Dictionary<object, RefCounted<SemaphoreSlim>> SemaphoreSlims
                        = new Dictionary<object, RefCounted<SemaphoreSlim>>();

  private SemaphoreSlim GetOrCreate(object key)
  {
    RefCounted<SemaphoreSlim> item;
    lock (SemaphoreSlims)
    {
      if (SemaphoreSlims.TryGetValue(key, out item))
      {
        ++item.RefCount;
      }
      else
      {
        item = new RefCounted<SemaphoreSlim>(new SemaphoreSlim(1, 1));
        SemaphoreSlims[key] = item;
      }
    }
    return item.Value;
  }

  public IDisposable Lock(object key)
  {
    GetOrCreate(key).Wait();
    return new Releaser { Key = key };
  }

  public async Task<IDisposable> LockAsync(object key)
  {
    await GetOrCreate(key).WaitAsync().ConfigureAwait(false);
    return new Releaser { Key = key };
  }

  private sealed class Releaser : IDisposable
  {
    public object Key { get; set; }

    public void Dispose()
    {
      RefCounted<SemaphoreSlim> item;
      lock (SemaphoreSlims)
      {
        item = SemaphoreSlims[Key];
        --item.RefCount;
        if (item.RefCount == 0)
          SemaphoreSlims.Remove(Key);
      }
      item.Value.Release();
    }
  }
}