Multithreading locking different ways?

The lock statement is analogous to Monitor.Enter, which does potentially block. Granted, in your example code, there shouldn't be any blocking issues; but I would wager that since lock provides blocking, it does a little more work (potentially) than TryEnter does.

1. Lock
2. Monitor.Enter
3. Monitor.TryEnter

100 iterations:
lock: 4.4 microseconds
Monitor.TryEnter: 16.1 microseconds
Monitor.Enter: 3.9 microseconds

100000 iterations:
lock: 2872.5 microseconds
Monitor.TryEnter: 5226.6 microseconds
Monitor.Enter: 2432.9 microseconds

This seriously undermines my initial guess and shows that, on my system, lock (which performs about the same as Monitor.Enter) actually drastically outperforms Monitor.TryEnter.