ReaderWriterLock.AcquireReaderLock takes too long to hit

Do you have only one writer?

Here is what I MSDN docs says (http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/system.threading.readerwriterlock.aspx):

   Readers and writers are queued separately. When a thread releases the writer lock,
   all threads waiting in the reader queue at that instant are granted reader locks; when 
   all of those reader locks have been released, the next thread waiting in the writer 
   queue, if any, is granted the writer lock, and so on. In other words, ReaderWriterLock 
   alternates between a collection of readers, and one writer.

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actually I have raised the priority of the reads and made the writes into background tasks

If you have multiple threads reading AND writing to your resource, you might want to just use a simple lock {} mechanism instead of using ReaderWriterLock.

What might be happening is multiple write threads are getting queued up and only a small number of reader threads are being processed.  So the locking is spending most of its time processing the Writer queue.

If you just use a simple lock, then readers and writers get the same preference.  

thanks