How can I tell if I am out of inotify watches?

Posted by Jorge Castro on Ask Ubuntu See other posts from Ask Ubuntu or by Jorge Castro
Published on 2012-06-21T17:28:08Z Indexed on 2012/06/24 15:25 UTC
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inotify

I use an application that consumes inotify watches. I've already set

fs.inotify.max_user_watches=32768

in /etc/sysctl.conf but last night the application stopped indexing unless I ran it manually, which leads me to suspect I am out of watches.

Since I don't know what the trade off is when I increase this number (does it consume more RAM?), I don't know if I should just increase this number, so I'd like to know if there's a way I can tell if it's using all these watches and what the tradeoffs might be for increasing it.

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