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Safe to use static lock variable in mvc

In a web application that fires of many ajax requests from different users to carry out actions. One of these requests fires off some database updates. If this is currently in progress I want to make sure other session requests for this action is just ignored. Is it safe to implement a static variable that I can lock so the action can be ignored by other requests if one is already in progress or would this just be a bad design?
Update
After digging more I came across Optimistic Concurrency. I'm using EF6 so to avoid this it sounds like all I need to do is with Concurrency Mode to fixed?

A solution based on static variables may look attractive, because it is easy to implement. However, it quickly becomes a maintenance liability, particularly in a web application environment.
The problem with static variables in web environments, such as IIS, is that they are not shared globally across your entire application: if you configure your app pool to have several worker processes, each process would have its own copy of all static variables. Moreover, if you configure your infrastructure for load balancing, each process on each server would have its own copy, with no control on the part of your application. In your situation this would mean a possibility of multiple updates happening at the same time.
That is why I would avoid using a static variable in situations when it is absolutely critical that at most a single request be in progress at any given time.
In your situation, the persistence layer should be in charge of not corrupting the data no matter how many updates are firing at the same time. Persistence layer needs to decide which requests to execute, and which to throw away. One approach to solving this problem is optimistic locking. See this Q&A for general information on how it could be implemented.

Blocking editing fields when already opened by another user [duplicate]

I have a SQL Server 2008 database and an asp.net frontend.
I would like to implement a lock when a user is currently editing a record but unsure of which is the best approach.
My idea is to have an isLocked column for the records and it gets set to true when a user pulls that record, meaning all other users have read only access until the first user finishes the editing.
However, what if the session times out and he/she never saves/updates the record, the record will remain with isLocked = true, meaning others cannot edit it, right?
How can I implement some sort of session time out and have isLocked be automatically set to false when the session times out (or after a predefined period)
Should this be implemented on the asp.net side or the SQL side?

Don't do it at all. Use optimistic concurrency instead.
Pessimistic locking is possible, but not from .Net applications. .Net app farms are not technically capable of maintaining a long lived session to keep a lock (obtained via sp_getapplock or, worse, obtained by real data locking) because .Net app farms:
load balance requests across instances
do not keep a request stack between HTTP calls
recycle the app domain
Before you say 'I don't have a farm, is only one IIS server' I will point out that you may only have one IIS server now and if you rely on it you will never be able to scale out, and you still have the problem of app-domain recycle.
Simulating locking via app specific updates (eg. 'is_locked' field) is deeply flawed in real use, for reasons you already started to see, and many more. When push comes to shove this is the only approach that can be made to work, but I never heard of anyone saying 'Gee, I'm really happy we implemented pessimistic locking with data writes!'. Nobody, ever.
App layer locking is also not workable, for exactly the same reasons .Net farms cannot use back-end locking (load-balancing, lack of context between calls, app-domain recycle). Writing a distributed locking app-protocol is just not going to work, that road is paved with bodies.
Just don't do it. Optimistic concurrency is sooooo much better in every regard.

Handling limitations in multithreaded server

In my client-server architecture I have few API functions which usage need to be limited.
Server is written in .net C# and it is running on IIS.
Until now I didn't need to perform any synchronization. Code was written in a way that even if client would send same request multiple times (e.g. create sth request) one call will end with success and all others with error (because of server code + db structure).
What is the best way to perform such limitations? For example I want no more that 1 call of API method: foo() per user per minute.
I thought about some SynchronizationTable which would have just one column unique_text and before computing foo() call I'll write something like foo{userId}{date}{HH:mm} to this table. If call end with success I know that there wasn't foo call from that user in current minute.
I think there is much better way, probably in server code, without using db for that. Of course, there could be thousands of users calling foo.
To clarify what I need: I think it could be some light DictionaryMutex.
For example:
private static DictionaryMutex FooLock = new DictionaryMutex();
FooLock.lock(User.GUID);
try
{
...
}
finally
{
FooLock.unlock(User.GUID);
}
EDIT:
Solution in which one user cannot call foo twice at the same time is also sufficient for me. By "at the same time" I mean that server started to handle second call before returning result for first call.

Note, that keeping this state in memory in an IIS worker process opens the possibility to lose all this data at any instant in time. Worker processes can restart for any number of reasons.
Also, you probably want to have two web servers for high availability. Keeping the state inside of worker processes makes the application no longer clustering-ready. This is often a no-go.
Web apps really should be stateless. Many reasons for that. If you can help it, don't manage your own data structures like suggested in the question and comments.
Depending on how big the call volume is, I'd consider these options:
SQL Server. Your queries are extremely simple and easy to optimize for. Expect 1000s of such queries per seconds per CPU core. This can bear a lot of load. You can use a SQL Express for free.
A specialized store like Redis. Stack Overflow is using Redis as a persistent, clustering-enabled cache. A good idea.
A distributed cache, like Microsoft Velocity. Or others.
This storage problem is rather easy because it fits a key/value store model well. And the data is near worthless so you don't even need to backup.
I think you're overestimating how costly this rate limitation will be. Your web-service is probably doing a lot more costly things than a single UPDATE by primary key to a simple table.

Best Option for Queuing Status Updates .NET

I'm looking for some feedback in regards to the best option for a problem I am working on.
To give you some background I recently inherited a broken business application (our project was using it, so we gained responsibility to fix it), I come from a SharePoint development background so a little C#, ASP.NET and SQL.
Currently we have an issue with the application where we continually receive timeout errors, I have narrowed it down to the web application calling a bunch of stored procedures to update status fields in other tables when something changes that might affect the status of other objects.
Without completely overhauling this application I have determined our best option is to offload these stored procedures to run in the background and not be tied to the UI. I've looked at a couple of options including:
Creating a separate thread to handle the execution. (Still times out)
Using BackgroundWorker (still times out, obviously it shouldn't but I can't seem to find out what is causing it to wait for the BackgroundWorker to finish)
Moving the Stored Proc execution to a job, which I then call from another SP. (This works, but the limitation is that I can only have one job running at once, and if multiple users update objects they then receive an exception because the job won't start)
Right now we have moved these stored procedures into a twice a day script, which updates all objects, however this is only a temporary fix.
I have two options that I'm looking at, and I'm hoping to get some guidance on the implementation of whatever you consider to be the best option:
Continue using the job and have the executing stored proc queue up items in a db which the job will loop through until empty. The executing stored proc will have to check if the job is running when it adds a new entry and then act accordingly.
It's been recommended that I look at using the Service Broker, but I am not familiar with it's use at all. I understand that it would likely be a better overall solution, as it allows me to queue up these updates in a more transactional way.
I think both these options are viable although I need some help in understanding the implementation of the second option. My other dilemma is with these stored procedures running anywhere from 45s to 20m how can I notify the user that changed the object that his/her updates have been made? This is where I fallback to using the job because i could simply add a user field into the 'queue' and have the stored proc send a quick email at the end.
Thoughts, suggestions? Maybe I'm over-thinking this?

If you are on .NET 4.5 and C# 5.0 use async and if you are on .NET 4.0 use TPL. They have the same underlying (almost) and async feature is built upon TPL (with some extra internals).
In any case TPL would be a proper choice.

Sounds like Service Broker would be an excellent solution to this problem. It's true that there is a bit of a learning curve to climb to get your head round how it works, but it's fundamentally pretty simple especially when your implementation is in a single database.
There's a good (and mercifully short) intro to how it works at http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-US/library/ms345108(v=SQL.90).aspx

Have a look at Asynchronous Procedure Execution. But I would look first if the updates can be improved, perhaps a simple index can eliminate the timeouts, and/or try to leverage snapshot isolation. These would be much simpler to try out w/o committing to 'major overhaul' of the application code.
I must also urge you to read Waits and Queues. This is a SQL Server methodology for identifying performance bottlenecks. Is a great way of narrowing down the problems of 'timeouts' to something more actionable (blocking, IO, indexes etc).

Some questions coming from application programming (C#/Visual C++) to ASP.NET (C#)

At the new place I am working, I've been tasking with developing a web-application framework. I am new (6 months ish) to the ASP.NET framework and things seem pretty straight forward, but I have a few questions that I'd like to ask you ASP professionals. I'll note that I am no stranger to C#.
Long life objects/Caching
What is the preferred method to deal with objects that you don't want to re-initialize every time a page is it? I noticed that there was a cache manager that can be used, but are there any caveats to using this? For example, I might want to cache various things and I was thinking about writing a wrapper around the cache that prefixed cache names so that I could implement different caches using the same underlying .NET cache manager.
1) Are there any design considerations I need to think about the objects that I am want to cache?
2) If I want to implement a manager of some time that is around during the lifetime of the web application (thread-safe, obviously), is it enough to initialize it during app_start and kill it in app_end? Or is this practiced frowned upon and any managers are created uniquely in the constructor/init method of the page being served.
3) If I have a long-term object initialized at app start, is this likely to get affected when the app pool is recycled? If it is destroy at app end is it a case of it simply getting destroyed and then recreated again? I am fine with this restriction, I just want to get a little clearer :)
Long Life Threads
I've done a bit of research on this and this question is probably redundant. It seems it is not safe to start a worker thread in the ASP.NET environment and instead, use a windows service to do long-running tasks. The latter isn't exactly a problem, the target environments will have the facility to install services, but I just wanted to double check that this was absolutely necessary. I understand threads can throw exceptions and die, but I do not understand the reasoning behind prohibiting them. If .NET provided a a thread framework that encompassed System.Thread, but also provided notifications for when the Application Server was going to recycle the App-Pool, we could actually do something about it rather than just keel over and die at the point we were stopped.
Are there any solutions to threading in ASP.NET or is it basically "service"?
I am sure I'll have more queries, but this is it for now.
EDIT: Thankyou for all the responses!

So here's the main thing that you're going to want to keep in mind. The IIS may get reset or may reset itself (based on criteria) while you're working. You can never know when that will happen unless it stops rendering your page while you're waiting on the response (in which case you'll get a browser notice that the page stopped responding, eventually.
Threads
This is why you shouldn't use threads in ASP.NET apps. However, that's not to say you can't. Once again, you'll need to configure the IIS engine properly (I've had it hang when spawning a lot of threads, but that may have been machine dependent). If you can trust that nobody will cause ASP.NET to recompile your code/restart your application (by saving the web.config, for instance) then you will have less issues than you might otherwise.
Instead of running a Windows service, you could use an ASMX or WCF service which also run on IIS/.NET. That's up to you. But with multiple service pools it allows you to keep everything "in the same environment" as far as installations and builds are concerned. They obviously don't share the same processpool/memoryspace.
"You're Wrong!"
I'm sure someone will read this far and go "but you can't thread in ASP.NET!!!" so here's the link that shows you how to do it from that venerable MSDN http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/magazine/cc164128.aspx
Now onto Long life objects/Caching
Caching
So it depends on what you mean by caching. Is this per user, per system, per application, per database, or per page? Each is possible, but takes some contrivance and complexity, depending on needs.
The simplest way to do it per page is with static variables. This is also highly dangerous if you're using it for user-code-stuff because there's no indication to the end user that the variable is going to change, if more than one users uses the page. Instead, if you need something to live with the user while they work with the page in particular, you could either stuff it into session (serverside caching, stays with the user, they can use it across multiple pages) or you could stick it into ViewState.
The cachemanager you reference above would be good for application style caching, where everyone using the webapp can use the same datastore. That might be good for intensive queries where you want to get the values back as quickly as possible so long as they're not stale. That's up to you to decide. Also, things like application settings could be stored there, if you use a database layer for storage.
Long term cache objects
You could initialize it in the app_start with no problem, and the same goes for destroying it at the end if you felt the need, but yes, you do need to watch out for what I described at first about the system throwing all your code out and restarting.
Keel over and die
But you don't get notified when you're (the app pool here) going to be restarted (as far as I know) so you can pretty much keel over and die on anything. Always assume the app is going to go down on you before your request, and that every request is the first one.
Really tho, that just leads back into web-design in the first place. You don't know that this is the first visitor or the fifty millionth (unless you're storing that information in memory of course) so just like the app is stateless, you also need to plan your architecture to be stateless as much as possible. That's where web-apps are great.
If you need state on a regular basis, consider sticking with desktop apps. If you can live with stateless-ness, welcome to ASP.NET and web development.

1) The main thing about caching is understanding the lifetime of the cache, and the effects of caching (particularly large) objects in cache. Consider caching a 1MB object in memory that is generated each time your default.aspx page is hit; and after a year of production you're getting 10,000 hits an hour, and object lifetime is 2 hours. You can easily chew up TONS of memory, which can affect performance, and also may cause things to be prematurely expired from the cache, which in turn can cause other issues. As long as you understand the effects of all of this, you're fine.
2) Starting it up in Application_Start and shutting it down in Application_End is fine. You can also implement a custom HttpApplication with an http module.
3) Yes, when your app pool is recycled it calls Application_End and everything is shutdown and destroyed.
4) (Threads) The issue with threads comes up in relation to scaling. If you hit that default.aspx page, and it fires up a thread, and that page gets hit 10,000 in 2 minutes, you could potentially have a ton of threads running in your application pool. Again, as long as you understand the ramifications of firing up a thread, you can do it. ThreadPool is another story, the asp.net runtime uses the ThreadPool to process requests, so if you tie up all the threadpool threads, your application can potentially hang because there isn't a thread available to process the request.

1) Are there any design considerations I need to think about the objects that I am want to cache?
2) If I want to implement a manager of some time that is around during the lifetime of the web application (thread-safe, obviously), is it enough to initialize it during app_start and kill it in app_end? Or is this practiced frowned upon and any managers are created uniquely in the constructor/init method of the page being served.
There's a difference between data caching and output caching. I think you're looking for data caching which means caching some object for use in the application. This can be done via HttpContext.Current.Cache. You can also cache page output and differentiate that on conditions so the page logic doesn't have to run at all. This functionality is also built into ASP.NET. Something to keep in mind when doing data caching is that you need to be careful about the scope of the things you cache. For example, when using Entity Framework, you might be tempted to cache some object that's been retrieved from the DB. However, if your DB Context is scoped per request (a new one for every user visiting your site, probably the correct way) then your cached object will rely on this DB Context for lazy loading but the DB Context will be disposed of after the first request ends.
3) If I have a long-term object initialized at app start, is this likely to get affected when the app pool is recycled? If it is destroy at app end is it a case of it simply getting destroyed and then recreated again? I am fine with this restriction, I just want to get a little clearer :)
Perhaps the biggest issue with threading in ASP.NET is that it runs in the same process as all your requests. Even if this weren't an issue in and of itself, IIS can be configured (and if you don't own the servers almost certainly will be configured) to shut down the app if it's inactive (which you mentioned) which can cause issues for these threads. I have seen solutions to that including making sure IIS never recycles the app pool to spawning a thread that hits the site to keep it alive even on hosted servers