Csharp Code Samples

File system watcher listens to the file system change notifications and raises events when a directory, or file in a directory, changes. A very useful tool since it notifies exactly at the moment when a file or directory is created, changed or deleted, without having to do polling on that directory. It can watch sub-directories too.

If that wasn’t enough it also provides filters. For instance u just want notifications about text files then you can provide a filter “*.txt”, now event will be raised only for text files.

The Problem

However there is a downside. The file system watcher is not entirely reliable for working with large volumes of files. The reason for this is that there is a fixed buffer allocated to each file system watcher which is used to store the details such as file location for each file that raises an event. However when a large number of files raise an event then this buffer gets full.

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