Observer and emitter timeout always set to 1 sec

[abulgher]

Hi there!

I have implemented a mirroring handler that is replicating the content of a directory (recursive) to another (network) location on windows.

I have subclassed the PatternMatchingEventHandler and using the standard Observer.

When I create the observer I used something like:

my_observer = watchdog.observers.Observer(timeout=0.1)

Running on windows, the Observer constructor is returning an instance of watchdog.observers.read_directory_changes.WindowsApiObserver that I think it is the correct behavior.

I'm expecting that the event queue is checked every 0.1 s for new events to be dispatched. Is this correct?

What I am observing is that if a parallel process is creating a bunch of new directories in the monitored directory, the corresponding events are processed with 1 second delay in between independently of the timeout value. If I set a timeout value greater than 1 s in the Observer constructor, I get anyhow 1 second delay in between.

If the parallel process instead of a bunch of directories creates a bunch of files, the Observer is reacting much faster, more or less at the speed I would expected having set 0.1 s timeout.

Looking at the source code for the WindowsApiObserver I have noticed a 'HACK' named WATCHDOG_TRAVERSE_MOVED_DIR_DELAY = 1. Has this something to do with what I am seeing? If so, it would be probably better to document this expected behavior somewhere.

Watchdog version 2.1.9
Python version 3.10.5
Windows Server