How to prevent EntityFramework deadlock when concurrently running these two statements

Question

Calls into my web service use the following code to ensure that the caller has a valid session. If a valid session found then it updates the session details and saves the changes. All simple enough and works fine.

// Create the Entity Framework context
using(MyContext ctx = CreateMyContext())
{
     // Get the user session for the client session         
     UserSession session = (from us in context.UserSessions.Include("UserEntity")
                            where us.SessionId = callerSessionId
                            select us).FirstOrDefault<UserSession>();

     if (session == null)
         return false;
     else
     {
         // Update session details
         session.Calls++;
         session.LastAccessed = DateTime.Now.Ticks;
         Console.WriteLine("Call by User:{0}", session.UserEntity.Name);

         // Save session changes back to the server
         ctx.SaveChanges();
         return true;
     }    
}

All works fine until the same caller, and hence the same session, makes multiple concurrent calls (which is perfectly valid to happen). In this case I sometimes get a deadlock. Using SQL Server Profiler I can see the following is happening.

Caller A performs the select and acquires a shared lock on the user session. Caller B performs the select and acquires a shared lock on the same user session. Caller A cannot perform its update because of Caller B's shared lock. Caller B cannot perform its update because of caller A's shared lock. Deadlock.

This seems like a simple and classic deadlock scenario and there must be a simple method to resolve it. Surely almost all real world applications have this same problem.But none of the Entity Frameworks books I have mention anything about deadlocks.

Answer 1

I found an article that talks about this HERE . It basically sounds like you can start and stop a transaction that surrounds your EF call... The block gives the following code example so credit goes to Diego B Vega... The blog post also links to another blog with additional information.

using (var scope = new TransactionScope(TransactionScopeOption.Required, new 
    TransactionOptions { IsolationLevel= IsolationLevel.Snapshot }))
{
    // do something with EF here
    scope.Complete();
}

Answer 2

Will the following work for you?

using(MyContext ctx = CreateMyContext())
{

     ctx.Database.ExecuteSqlCommand("SET TRANSACTION ISOLATION LEVEL READ UNCOMMITTED;");


     // Get the user session for the client session         
     ...
}

Answer 3

You probably have each session using a transaction maybe? in which case they will deadlock as the transactions both try to upgrade from shared lock to exclusive lock when they attempt to save. This seems to be not well documented since EF favours optimistic concurrency.

One way out of this is to provide an updatelock hint using something like this:

return context.TestEntities
          .SqlQuery("SELECT TOP 1 Id, Value FROM TestEntities WITH (UPDLOCK)")
          .Single();
}

see: entity framework 6 and pessimistic concurrency