Multithreading and locking- performance impact

[jaleel]

Hi ,

We have a Windows service which polls a DB table and spawns separate threads for each row in the table. Each thread carries some specific information from the table.Here the requirement is we need to update a thirdpart component by each thread(ofcourse, the information carried by the thread).The thirdparty componet is accessed through a ClassLibrary( using the API provided by thirdparty component). Here, we need to ensure that exclusive access of the third party component by each thread.To achieve this, what we did is,

1. in the windows service component ,create an instance of the class library which contains the code for accessing the third party component.

2. The call of the the method of the class library is put in a lock statement.
the locker object is a static instance of Object class
3. after executing , the lock is released.

Here our concern is the performance impact. We have a chance of having maximum 20 threads at a time(using a thread pool). But I heard that the use of lock statement will definitely makes the processing in a single threaded manner.

Could you please share experiences and knowledge when using locks in multithreaded environment?

Thanks in advance