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Running VSCode On Linux: Hitting My Watcher Limit And What To Do About It

Stephen Charles Weiss on September 24, 2019

I have been working on a Linux VM more recently, and one particularly annoying thing about it (there are a lot of little quirks that are frustratin...
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Paweł Świątkowski

Actually, having to increase the limit may mean that something is wrong with VSCode or rather one of its plugins. Such as that it monitors node_modules or something.

While increasing the limits helps to hack around the problem, it may actually backfire later. Would be useful to report it somewhere. I remember quite similar discussion about Parcel.

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oof2win2

Hiyas. This is the issue that is dealing with the whole amount of file watchers not working properly and watching node_modules directories in multi-root workspaces.

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Stephen Charles Weiss

100% agree with this. At the time, however, I needed the hack and an ability to see my changes.

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Kevin Ard

Inotify is kinda awesome, really. The inotifywait cmd exposes an ignore pattern (like gitignore, rsync, etc). It would be GREAT if IDEs let us grab that, too! Preeeety sure, my limit is being reached because of the trillion files in my node_modules lol

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TKDMzq • Edited

Yea ist main suspect. But how would vs code know if we installed new module to get exports from it?

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Kevin Ard

Could always fall-back to the universal polling mechanism (eg check ignored dirs every 3-ish seconds).

Alt, my Intellij has pre- and post-scripts that run after certain commands. Those could exec only after npm **.

This is purely theoretical, though 🤷‍♀️ (unless someone on here is building the IDEs)

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lesha 🟨⬛️

trillion files in my node_modules

 w h a t

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Kevin Ard

Rough estimate 😉

(But... Now I'm absolutely going to run a file count on my node_modules when I get back to the office)

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Kevin Ard

Update:

❯ find . -type f | grep node_modules | wc -l
412140

But, to be fair: That's from a pretty large project with several microservice modules in it.

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le-hu

I had this error trying to run LiveShare once I've added many folders into my workspace, once I've removed 20+ folders from workplace and left only one - the problem disappeared.

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Priyab Dash

Thanks for sharing this no e hack I am planning to use a Linux VM soon for my Dev work, will use your hack

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laird.streak

You can also add ignore folders and files in your settings file ignoring the virtual environment and folders such as .git will help.