Reloading relying-party.xml causes too many requests for metadata.

[Pavlos Drandakis]

Hello all,

I have an IdP (v2.3.0) that is configured to load remotely configuration 
files and reload them every 24h. Federation's metadata are also 
configured to be loaded remotely by using FileBackedHTTPMetadataProvider.

Although IdP seems to work just fine, I think that there is a bug in 
reloading procedure. I 've noticed that, every time that IdP is checking 
for metadata, there are too many requests and also that, day by day, 
this number is constantly increasing.
I suspect that this is happening because every time relying-party.xml is 
reloaded a new background process is created for checking metadata 
without "killing/re-using" the old one.
In the attached file there are configuration and access.log snippets 
from a test that I run yesterday (relying-party.xml is reloaded every 
2min, metadata file is checked every 1min), in order to show the 
constantly increasing number of requests.

Having IdP running for 3 months, reloading relying-party.xml every day 
and checking metadata every 3 hours produces a large number of requests 
to web server that holds metadata...

Any thoughts, comments, suggestions?
Thanks,
Pavlos
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