Too many open files

[oleksandr]

Too many open files

[gorakhargosh]

Yes, this is owing to kqueue being used on OS X/BSD. I have yet to get around to fixing the FSEvents code to work on OS X. kqueue by design opens file descriptors for all the files it needs to monitor. Hence if you're monitoring a directory with a lot of files, you're likely to run into this problem. For now there's only one workaround and that involves setting ulimit -n <some-high-number> in your ~/.profile file.

Perhaps, if someone can get the fsevents code fixed before I can get around to it, you wouldn't have this problem on OS X.

Cheers!

[oleksandr]

Thanks for a prompt response. I would like to take a deeper look, may be implementing the fix... Wouldn't directory snapshotting be a workaround in this case? What would be the other suggestion to fixing this issue?

Thanks!

[gorakhargosh]

Directory snapshotting code already exists in the code base. Perhaps, another fix could be letting users choose (via a command line option) the observer to use. You can see the --debug-force-polling option to the log subcommand. It forces the use of snapshotting (which is rather slow but works). May be such options can be added to the shell-command subcommand as well.

Cheers!

[oleksandr]

Right, the snapshotting is so slooooooooow... According to the following:

try: # pragma: no cover
    from watchdog.observers.fsevents import FSEventsObserver_BUGGY_TODO as _Observer

FSEvents observer never gets called.

[gorakhargosh]

Yes, it's currently disabled in the release.