FileSystemWatcher stops raising events after a period of time

Question

We have built a window service that listens to folders with FileSystemWatcher, when created we process the file and so on. But after couple of days the event stops working.

• Is it possible that it being collected by the garbage collector (GC)?
• Does the GC collect it holding class (which is a singleton)?
• Should I use a weak event?
• Do I have a bug that means the event gets unregistered?

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What i think the problem is, that FSW has an internal buffer, when it overflows its an error, take a look in this article that offer code to solve this problem.
Hope this help anyone.

Answer 1

A couple of things to try, as suggested here:

• In the timer tick event handler, stop your timer before doing your tick event handling, and restart it before exiting the handler
• Wrap your timer code in a try/catch block to see what's happening.
• Read the Elapsed event of the System.Timers.Timer class is not raised in a Windows service bug description/fix and see if that helps you.

In summary:

protected virtual void TimerTick(object sender, EventArgs e)
{
    // stop your timer
    this.timer.Stop();

    try
    {
        // TODO: add event handler specifics
    }
    catch
    {
        // TODO: add some logging to help you see what's going on
    }        

    // restart your timer
    this.timer.Start();
}