The default value of inotify.max_user_watches sysctl parameter was set to 8192 since the introduction of the inotify feature in 2005 by commit 0eeca28300df ("[PATCH] inotify"). Today this value is just too small for many modern usage. As a result, users have to explicitly set it to a larger value to make it work. After some searching around the web, these are the inotify.max_user_watches values used by some projects: - vscode: 524288 - dropbox support: 100000 - users on stackexchange: 12228 - lsyncd user: 2000000 - code42 support: 1048576 - monodevelop: 16384 - tectonic: 524288 - openshift origin: 65536 Each watch point adds an inotify_inode_mark structure to an inode to be watched. Modeled after the epoll.max_user_watches behavior to adjust the default value according to the amount of addressable memory available, make inotify.max_user_watches behave in a similar way to make it use no more than 1% of addressable memory within the range [8192, 1048576]. For 64-bit archs, inotify_inode_mark should have a size of 80 bytes. That means a system with 8GB or more memory will have the maximum value of 1048576 for inotify.max_user_watches. This default should be big enough for most of the use cases. Signed-off-by: Waiman Long <longman@xxxxxxxxxx> --- fs/notify/inotify/inotify_user.c | 14 +++++++++++++- 1 file changed, 13 insertions(+), 1 deletion(-) diff --git a/fs/notify/inotify/inotify_user.c b/fs/notify/inotify/inotify_user.c index 186722ba3894..2da8b7a84b12 100644 --- a/fs/notify/inotify/inotify_user.c +++ b/fs/notify/inotify/inotify_user.c @@ -801,6 +801,18 @@ SYSCALL_DEFINE2(inotify_rm_watch, int, fd, __s32, wd) */ static int __init inotify_user_setup(void) { + unsigned int watches_max; + struct sysinfo si; + + si_meminfo(&si); + /* + * Allow up to 1% of addressible memory to be allocated for inotify + * watches (per user) limited to the range [8192, 1048576]. + */ + watches_max = (((si.totalram - si.totalhigh) / 100) << PAGE_SHIFT) / + sizeof(struct inotify_inode_mark); + watches_max = min(1048576U, max(watches_max, 8192U)); + BUILD_BUG_ON(IN_ACCESS != FS_ACCESS); BUILD_BUG_ON(IN_MODIFY != FS_MODIFY); BUILD_BUG_ON(IN_ATTRIB != FS_ATTRIB); @@ -827,7 +839,7 @@ static int __init inotify_user_setup(void) inotify_max_queued_events = 16384; init_user_ns.ucount_max[UCOUNT_INOTIFY_INSTANCES] = 128; - init_user_ns.ucount_max[UCOUNT_INOTIFY_WATCHES] = 8192; + init_user_ns.ucount_max[UCOUNT_INOTIFY_WATCHES] = watches_max; return 0; } -- 2.18.1