Watcher crashes when large folder has lots of changes

[isidorn]

Refs: #29478
Linux Ubuntu 14, vscode 64 bit

1. Clonse vscode, electron, open both repositories in VS Code
2. while VS Code is open do a npm install in electron, and then a scripts/npm.sh i in vscode
3. I see the file watcher crashing and all file events after that are ignored for the second repository

Do we have file watcher per repo? If yes then it seems like in this case the file watcher for repository vscode crashed. Could we detect a crash and just restart it?

[Tyriar]

Cannot repro on macOS, will have to try on Linux.

@isidorn did you increase your watch limit as in https://code.visualstudio.com/docs/setup/linux#_error-enospc?

[isidorn]

@Tyriar yes, I increased it to 524288

[bpasero]

It would be nice if this limit could be set per-process and actually by the watcher process itself. Not sure that is possible though.

[Tyriar]

I think it's a system-wide limit and you need sudo to be able to set it, so we can't really do it on our side AFAIK.

[bpasero]

Yeah, sucks. I was always hoping that process.setFdLimit(maxDescriptors) could be used to set it higher, but it will never be higher than the system limit it seems.

[bpasero]

This bug is quite old and we have since then updated to a newer version of nsfw. I cannot reproduce, on Ubuntu 20 at least. I suggest we close this. I also didn't see this reported from other users.