C# .NET Programming Blog

Race conditions occur when two or more threads try to gain control of the same object. In a threaded application multiple instances of threads run concurrently. These threads may share some variables such as counters or some other global objects. There is every chance that multiple threads simultaneously try to write values to the same object. This is known as a race condition.

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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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