Intermittent System.IO.DirectoryNotFoundException on web server accessing network drive

Question

We have a web server running hangfire that intermittently polls a shared network drive with a path example of:

\\SXXXXX\XXXXX$\XXX\ 

which intermittently throws a System.IO.DirectoryNotFoundException however the directory is created by the same piece of code.

It seems to run fine 8/10 times and on the 2 times it throws the exception it actually deletes the folder if its empty which is code that runs after the point of the exception?

Here's an example code block:

 var downloadDirectory = "*OMITTED*
        Directory.CreateDirectory(downloadDirectory);
        TestDirectoryCreatedOnNetwork(downloadDirectory);


var dir = new DirectoryInfo(downloadDirectory);

        if (dir.GetFiles().Count() == 0)
        {
            Directory.Delete(downloadDirectory);
            return false;
        }

Googling brought us to the idea that: Directory.CreateDirectory() would potentially suffer from latency so we added the following:

private static void TestDirectoryCreatedOnNetwork(string directory)
    {
        int waitCount = 10;
        do
        {
            if (Directory.Exists(downloadDirectory))
            {
                break;
            }

            Thread.Sleep(10000); // sleep 100ms
            waitCount--;
            if (waitCount <= 0)
            {
                throw new Exception("Failed to create directory");
            }
        } while (true);
    }

We know that the code works because of the fact that it runs 8/10 times so we're not really sure where to go from here.

Thanks!

Answer 1

As mentioned in the comments this was caused by poor network conditions, we've since moved the folder creation onto the actual web servers local drives and everything is now working