I have a collection of objects that's constantly changing, and I want to display some information about objects (my application is multi-threaded, and differently threads are constantly submitting requests to modify an object in the collection, so it's unpredictable), and I want to display some information about what's currently in the collection.

If I lock the collection, I can iterate over it and get my information without any problems - however, this causes problems with the other threads, since they could have submitted multiple requests to modify the collection in the meantime, and will be stalled. I've thought of a couple ways around this, and I'm looking for any advice.

• Make a copy of the collection and iterate over it, allowing the original to continue updating in the background. The collection can get large, so this isn't ideal, but it's safe.
• Iterate over it using a For...Next loop, and catch an IndexOutOfBounds exception if an item is removed from the collection while we're iterating. This may occasionally cause duplicates to appear in my snapshot, so it's not ideal either.

Any other ideas? I'm only concerned about a moment-in-time snapshot, so I'm not concerned about reflecting changes in my application - my main concern is that the collection be able to be updated with minimal latency, and that updates never be lost.