Question

I need a operations which needs to run every x seconds forever, and to achieve this I did:

protected void Application_Start()
{
    InitialieOnce.Initialize();
}

public static class InitialieOnce
{
    private static bool initialized = false;

    public static void Initialize()
    {
        if (initialized == false)
        {
            initialized = true;
            Thread t = new Thread(x => CheckStatus());
            t.IsBackground = true;
            t.Start();
        }
    }

    private static void CheckStatus()
    {
        //My script goes here.
        Thread.Sleep(8000);
        CheckStatus();
    }
}

After some time (about 5 minutes) I get this error:

"An unhandled exception of type ‘System.StackOverflowException’ occurred in mscorlib.dll"

Can this error be related to how I made my infinite loop?

If yes, is there a better way to achieve this, can I fix it, or is this code ok?

Answer 1

You are calling “CheckStatus” recursively. So every 8 seconds there will be one more entry on your call stack:

CheckStatus() -> CheckStatus() -> CheckStatus() -> and so on.. until you get a StackOverflowException.

Instead you should use

while (true)
{
    /* Your Code */
    Thread.Sleep(8000);
}

Please also note that by default IIS will unload your application if there was no request in 15 minutes, resulting in your thread being killed.