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How to increase the number of inotify watches

What is this limit?

Under GNU/Linux, cozy-desktop is notified of file system changes via inotify. This mechanism has a limit for the number of files and directories that it can watch, to avoid taking too much memory.

On modern computers, it is recommended to use at least 524288 for this limit.

How to increase it

If you are running Ubuntu, Debian, RedHat, or another similar Linux distribution, run the following in a terminal:

echo fs.inotify.max_user_watches=524288 | sudo tee -a /etc/sysctl.conf \
&& sudo sysctl -p

If you are running ArchLinux, run the following command instead:

echo fs.inotify.max_user_watches=524288 \
| sudo tee /etc/sysctl.d/40-max-user-watches.conf \
&& sudo sysctl --system

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