.NET Memory Model Bytecode Reordering - Mark Nicholson

The .NET ECMA specified memory model is weaker than the x86 hardware memory model. When you run your multi-threaded .NET applications on a multi-processor machine with a weak memory model, such as the Intel Itanium Architecture (IA64), your programs may not execute as expected. This is because weaker memory models can reorder memory operations (loads and stores) out of program sequence in order to improve performance. This reordering is guaranteed to have no visible side-effects on a single thread of execution. However, if you are accessing memory across threads, and the stores to, and loads from that memory are reordered, this may produce undesirable side-effects, effectively breaking your well-crafted application. .NET only offers a full memory fence that is a read (load) and write (store) memory barrier (fence) in one, via System.Threading.Thread.MemoryBarrier. Some hardware platforms offer separate read and write memory barriers, which can further improve performance.