I have a strange problem with named pipes, so here is the description:
I use named pipes in order to transfer cache between new and old instances of an application.
it happens like this:
1) When the application starts, it tries to connect and receive cache from an old instance of the application.
2) When the application started, it's ready to provide cache to the next new application.
3) I have 2 pipes, let's call them, pipe1 and pipe2
3.1) the first app uses pipe1 to provide cache and pipe2 to receive cache
3.2) the second app uses vice verse, pipe2 to provide cache and pipe1 to receive cache
4) after new app started, the old one will be destroyed
5) instances of the application work on the same machine
in general, it works fine. (if I update my app once a day or once in two, three days)
but I haven't done it (updates) for a few weeks and I have encountered to the problem: the application works for a couple of weeks without updating. it means that the first app kept pipe1 opened for a couple of weeks, and when I started updating, the new instance of the app (at least as I can judge according to my logs) connected to the old instance to the pipe1 and just froze! nothing was happening, it wasn't able to start in other words.
Questions:
1) for how long a pipe can be opened? for example, if I use this:
pipe.BeginWaitForConnection(myCallBack, pipe);
if I want to connect in a few weeks to the pipe, is it still be opened and ready to work?
2) or what might have gone wrong here?
*just want to remind: it worked fine before this 'long' period of time between updates.
thanks in advance for any ideas or suggestions!
update 1: Actually I have 3 couples of named pipes
(A1 A2), (B1 B2), (C1 C2) in that example A1 is equal to pipe1 and A2 is equal to pipe2. and the algorithm is the same for each couple. (one couple for transferring cache, another one for transferring user's sessions, etc)
the first pair (A1 A2) got the exception System.IO.IOException: The semaphore timeout period has expired
and only the second pair froze...