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Node PTY and satellite Dotnet processes

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Stephen Cooper edited this page Jun 20, 2019 · 1 revision

DotnetRunner uses Node-PTY to launch the .NET apps.

As part of this a few satellite process are spawned:

On Windows

  • Powershell
  • winpty-agent
  • node.js processes
  • windows command proccessor.
  • .NET Core Host x4 (when executing dotnet run)

When stopping a .NET app most of these processes are stopped. All the ones used by Node-PTY, however not all .NET process are stopped.

This is due to the way the dotnet CLI functions. When sending the SIGHUP signal it will stop the main process running the app but the satellite process will remain and be re-used next time dotnet run is executed.

This is what the purge functionality was implemented for, to allow a sledgehammer approach to terminate all these. A more sophisticated method may be implemented in the future.

This also means that when running many .NET apps there will be three extra process per app running even when they have been stopped.

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