Linux

inotify Instances .Net Core on Linux

Now you get the exception "The configured user limit (128) on the number of inotify instances has been reached" and you wonder what the heck is going on.  For me I never got this exception on my local instance of Docker running on my Mac or in Windows but I would see my app just stop running in Linux.  Even weirder I could run the app fine in Windows hosted by Kestrel.  So where does this error start coming from?  

After much digging, I found the problem was with the IConfiguration interface.  Specificially, I was calling pulling the JSON configuration files multiple times which was reloading the IConfiguration interface.  The issue was that it was rebuilding the configuration and re-attaching the "reloadOnChange" setting.  Since the reloadOnChange was set to true it was attaching a new file watch multiple times and was hitting the limit.  That all being said, I never saw this issue locally on my Mac or Windows or my local instances of Docker on either which I think is related to the way the underlying Docker Linux host manages the watch on the files.  

Something else as a side note, since the files were being tracked, even though I was disposing of the class it wasn't releasing the watch and thus keeping these connections open.  The simple fix was to set the reloadOnChange to false but to make it even better was to just create a singleton of the data and thus prevent the data from being ever reloaded.  I don't think it is necessarily a bug with .Net but it is a weird side effect of how the host can cause problems with a framework.  

I hope this helps some people save some time that I lost dealing with this crazy issue.