Pure-Ruby concurrent Hash

Since you mention the Hash would be read heavy, having one mutex locking both read and writes would result in race conditions that are most probably won by reads. If that's ok with you, then ignore the answer.

If you want to give writes a priority, an read-write lock would help. The following code is based on some old c++ assignment for Operating Systems class, so might not be best quality, but gives a general idea.

require 'thread'

class ReadWriteLock
  def initialize
    @critical_section = Mutex.new
    @are_writers_finished = ConditionVariable.new
    @are_readers_finished = ConditionVariable.new
    @readers = 0
    @writers = 0
    @writer_locked = false
  end

  def read
    begin
      start_read
      yield
    ensure
      end_read
    end
  end

  def start_read
    @critical_section.lock
    while (@writers != 0 || @writer_locked)
      @are_writers_finished.wait(@critical_section)
    end
    @readers += 1
    @critical_section.unlock
  end

  def end_read
    @critical_section.lock
    if (@readers -= 1) == 0
      @are_readers_finished.broadcast
    end
    @critical_section.unlock
  end

  def write
    begin
      start_write
      yield
    ensure
      end_write
    end
  end

  def start_write
    @critical_section.lock
    @writers += 1
    while @readers > 0
      @are_readers_finished.wait(@critical_section)
    end
    while @writer_locked
      @are_writers_finished.wait(@critical_section)
    end
    @writers -= 1
    @writer_locked = true
    @critical_section.unlock
  end

  def end_write
    @critical_section.lock
    @writer_locked = false
    @are_writers_finished.broadcast
    @critical_section.unlock
  end
end

Then just wrap []= and [] in lock.write and lock.read. Might have a performance impact, but will guarantee that writes will 'get through' the reads. Usefulness of this depends on how read heavy it actually is.