so yeah what is this you might say this is a weird title, this is not philosophy why are you doing this you might say. this is my blog i post what i want whenever i want so if you faced this error read if not skip ahead simple. don’t complain in my Dm’s
I launched my trusty obsidian vault and about to start to get down to my usual productiviy note taking system… then i get the error
Error ENOSPC System limit for number of file watchers reached
I start to panic and think maybe its something faulty in the program startup I should close it and start it up again. then the same error pop up. third time is a charm they say I tried I again it did not work i updated my machine a few hours ago so I am now thinking that this might be some changes to the kernel modules and that is why this is acting up. maybe if I reboot it, the pc would benefit from the updates and this would go away I thought. So I did reboot it and the error kept on poping up. so I went to the internet to search for and dig up some answers.
It turns out that the maximum number of files the system can monitor had been reached. Since I am not working on a project larger than I have in the past I not sure why this happened. It turns out that the limit was 8,192, which is fairly low for a software developer. Fortunately, it is easy to increase the limit.
Use the below command to check the current limit.
cat /proc/sys/fs/inotify/max_user_watches
// response
8192
Startpaging around I found that 524,288 is a popular number for setting the new limit. To do so:
echo fs.inotify.max_user_watches=524288 | sudo tee -a /etc/sysctl.conf
// response
fs.inotify.max_user_watches=524288
Have the Linux kernel read & use the new limit.
sudo sysctl -p
// response
fs.inotify.max_user_watches = 524288
Check the number of watchers again just to be sure.
cat /proc/sys/fs/inotify/max_user_watches
// response
524288
Now you can finally rest in peace and never worry again about your number of file watches