FileWatcher Error, Internal buffer overflow

Question

After a deploy, my Sitecore Azure instance is heavily slowed down and I get the following error on and on,

2017-06-29T08:22:15  PID[42864] Error       54964 08:22:15 ERROR Error in FileWatcher. Internal buffer overflow.
Exception: System.IO.InternalBufferOverflowException
Message: Too many changes at once in directory:D:\home\site\wwwroot\.

I tried the dark magic of "change sitecore license file location" described here but it had no effect

What can I do to remove this error / speed up the instance so that contributors can do their work ?

Answer 1

We currently have the same issue and have been advised to set the following config (in Sitecore.config) to a higher value:

<setting name="Media.FileSystemWatcher.BufferSize" value="16384" />

We are currently trial & erroring this value right now, but others have reported a positive outcome.

Answer 2

This is a known issue and acknowledged by Sitecore. Whilst it is being further investigated, Sitecore recommend in their Knowledge Base article one of the following solutions:

• Disable Dynamic Cache by creating an App Setting for the impacted App Service:

  • App Setting Name: WEBSITE_DYNAMIC_CACHE
  • App Setting Value: 0

• Updating Sitecore Configuration and disable \wwwroot\App_config\Include\Sitecore.Diagnostics.config file as mentioned in the answer from @Tom Dudfield

Answer 3

Disabling the Sitecore config Sitecore.Diagnostics.config seems to have resolved the issue for us, this stops data being written to the diagnostics folder.

Answer 4

You might also consider disabling/deleting the FileWatchers completely. In general, we do this because we won't make any changes to the filesystem outside of a deploy (we don't change views, configs etc. and we only upload medias through Sitecore, not by using the file system). Hereby we save the additional work-load and threads caused by the FileWatchers, but keep the watchers locally so you can make changes without recycling the application...