FileSystemWatcher drops events for nested files on Codespaces

[mattseddon]

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Tl;dr:

On Codespaces the extension host's FileSystemWatcher seems to drop events for files that are at a certain depth within a nested folder structure. Here is a quick demo of what I am talking about (with log level set to trace and the "Output" tab showing the "Remote Server"):

screen.recording.mov

I cannot recreate behaviour outside of Codespaces. I.e locally or inside of a normal devcontainer. Is this normal/expected or is there an issue here?

More details:

Hi,

I work at iterative.ai and we've built a VS Code extension (DVC for VS Code). One of the main use cases is that you can run, compare, visualize, and track machine learning experiments right in VS Code. The extension can provide real-time updates to pre-defined plots. In order to do this we rely on the extension host's FileSystemWatcher. That looks like this:

Screen.Recording.2023-02-23.at.1.27.04.pm.mov

We got some reports that "plots live updates" stopped working in Codespaces from our customer success team (iterative/vscode-dvc#3264). Investigating further it appears that the FileSystemWatcher's behaviour is different in Codespaces.

Please let me know if there is a better place to raise this issue and I will happily move it there.

Thank you.

The original discussion is here: microsoft/vscode-discussions#486 (no response)

[dmilburn]

Hi from the codespaces team, thank for reaching out and i'm sorry for the inconvenience. I've created an internal issue to track the bug and have sent it to the right team for prioritization. However, I can't guarantee when it'll be prioritized at this time.

[jkeech]

@mattseddon thanks for reporting! Could you open an issue in microsoft/vscode with these details (https://github.com/microsoft/vscode/issues)? The FileSystemWatcher API is part of VS Code and the Codespaces extension doesn't have any control over how that VS Code feature works.

[mattseddon]

@jkeech my use of the API between Codespaces and normal VS Code is the same yet I get unexpected behaviour in Codespaces. Is the underlying implementation the same?

[jkeech]

@mattseddon, there are a few different VS Code scenarios:

1. Desktop VS Code running locally
2. Desktop VS Code attached to a remote: Dev Containers, Remote - SSH, Codespaces, etc
3. Web VS Code running locally (fully in the browser): github.dev, vscode.dev, etc
4. Web VS Code attached to a remote: Codespaces, etc

All four of those scenarios are a little bit different since different parts of VS Code are executing locally vs remotely and in Electron/Node vs the browser, but there's no Codespaces-specific implementation of the VS Code APIs. Codespaces will end up using scenario (2) or scenario (4) in the list above depending on if you connect from desktop or web. In either case, the implementation of the FileSystemWatcher API lives inside VS Code.

Are you seeing this issue in (2) or (4) or both?

[jkeech]

Particularly if you are seeing this issue in both (2) and (4), but not in Dev Containers or Remote - SSH which are also in scenario (2), that would point to something on the Codespaces remote side (container/VM config). But if you are only seeing this issue in (4), then it's likely a VS Code issue with scenario (4) which should apply to any other Web VS Code attached to a remote.

[mattseddon]

Sorry for the delay. I opened microsoft/vscode#176327

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