Re: Maximum number of inotify watches

From: Tvrtko Ursulin
Date: Wed Jun 22 2011 - 10:28:44 EST


On Wednesday 22 Jun 2011 13:59:20 Tiberiu C. Turbureanu wrote:
> Hello,
>
> I want to monitor all the files on a server using one instance of
> inotify and about 20M watches recursively set on directories in '/' tree
> substructure. I'd want to be notified about all type of events defined
> by inotify (create, delete, access, modify etc.)
>
> Assuming this monitor daemon running in user-space keeps up with the
> frequency of new events in the kernel queue (it reads them), is it
> possible to exceed the kernel memory limit because there are too many
> watches and events?

It does sounds unrealistic with your number of watches.

Have a look at fanotify which will give you a subset of inotify events for
just one watch per mount point. If you really need events which are not
available maybe they can be added.

Tvrtko
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