ConcurrentDictionary is a thread-safe dictionary implementation but surprisingly (at least to me) not all of its members can be safely used by multiple threads concurrently. The Thread Safety section on the ConcurrentDictionary MSDN article has this to say:

All public and protected members of ConcurrentDictionary<TKey, TValue> are thread-safe and may be used concurrently from multiple threads. However, members accessed through one of the interfaces the ConcurrentDictionary<TKey, TValue> implements, including extension methods, are not guaranteed to be thread safe and may need to be synchronized by the caller.

It is guaranteed that invoking the ConcurrentDictionary methods and properties is thread safe, but since it implements several interfaces (e.g. IDictionary , ICollection ) using one of their members (or extension methods for them) isn’t. One of these examples is LINQ’s Enumerable.ToList , which is an extension method for IEnumerable . Using it on a ConcurrentDictionary instance while it’s being mutated by other threads may throw an ArgumentException . Here’s a simple repro:

var dictionary = new ConcurrentDictionary < int , int >(); Task . Run (() => { var random = new Random (); while ( true ) { var value = random . Next ( 10000 ); dictionary [ value ] = value ; } }); while ( true ) { dictionary . ToList (); }

This happens because the extension method calls the List constructor that accepts an IEnumerable and that constructor has an optimization for ICollection (which ConcurrentDictionary implements);

public List ( IEnumerable < T > collection ) { ICollection < T > c = collection as ICollection < T >; if ( c != null ) { int count = c . Count ; if ( count == 0 ) { _items = _emptyArray ; } else { _items = new T [ count ]; // Gets the dictionary size c . CopyTo ( _items , 0 ); // Copy from the dictionary to the array _size = count ; } } else { // ... } }

It first gets the size of the dictionary by invoking Count , then initializes an array in that size and finally calls CopyTo to copy over all the KeyValuePair items from the dictionary to that array. Since the dictionary is mutated by multiple threads, the size can increase (or decrease) after Count is invoked but before CopyTo is. That will result in an ArgumentException when the ConcurrentDictionary tries to access the array outside its bounds.

If you just need a separate collection with the dictionary’s items this exception can be avoided by calling the ConcurrentDictionary.ToArray method instead, which operates in a similar way, but does so after acquiring all the dictionary’s internal locks:

public KeyValuePair < TKey , TValue >[] ToArray () { int locksAcquired = 0 ; try { AcquireAllLocks ( ref locksAcquired ); int count = 0 ; checked { for ( int i = 0 ; i < m_tables . m_locks . Length ; i ++) { count += m_tables . m_countPerLock [ i ]; } } KeyValuePair < TKey , TValue >[] array = new KeyValuePair < TKey , TValue >[ count ]; CopyToPairs ( array , 0 ); return array ; } finally { ReleaseLocks ( 0 , locksAcquired ); } }

This method, however, shouldn’t be confused with LINQ’s Enumerable.ToArray extension method, that may throw an ArgumentException just like Enumerable.ToList . ConcurrentDictionary.ToArray wins the overload resolution over Enumerable.ToArray since the latter is an extension method but if the dictionary is used through one of its interfaces (that inherits from IEnumerable ) the Enumerable.ToArray method will be called and the exception may be thrown. So the following piece of code doesn’t throw:

var dictionary = new ConcurrentDictionary < int , int >(); Task . Run (() => { var random = new Random (); while ( true ) { var value = random . Next ( 10000 ); dictionary [ value ] = value ; } }); while ( true ) { dictionary . ToArray (); }

But explicitly holding the dictionary in an IDictionary variable does: