Increase the frequency in which Nextcloud Client scans the synchronized folders

nihil21 · January 21, 2021, 2:57pm

Hi everyone,

I’m using Nextcloud server 20.0.5 and Nextcloud client 3.1.1. Since my synchronized folders are quite big, I’m getting the warning " Changes In Synchronized Folders Not Being Tracked Reliably".
I know that to avoid this I should increase the number of inotify watches (as described here), but since it’s already set to 524288, and I’m using the client on a laptop, I fear that increasing it even more could impact the battery life.

Therefore, I was wondering if it were possible to increase the frequency in which the client scans the folder from the default 2 hours to, for example, 30 minutes.

Thanks in advance.

prg99 · May 10, 2021, 1:09pm

Did you figure this out as I am getting the same error/warning?

nihil21 · May 10, 2021, 4:53pm

Unfortunately, I didn’t. However, after a while, the warning disappeared and now it seems that the client is aware of files’ changes right after they’re made, so it seems to be fixed by itself (?).

prg99 · May 11, 2021, 9:30am

What is strange to me is that I think that it doesn’t happen with every computer I have (need to test this but its tricky in covid times), running the same OS with same file systems and similar if not the same config.

I am using Kubuntu 20.04 LTS, XFS / BTRFS filesystems.

prg99 · May 14, 2021, 9:42am

I get this error as well.

“The watcher did not receive a test notification.”

Could that be something wrong with the system?

szaimen · May 14, 2021, 9:45am

Hi, maybe this can help you?
https://docs.nextcloud.com/desktop/3.2/advancedusage.html

prg99 · May 14, 2021, 9:48am

Thanks! Looks helpful.

I had a infrequently used data set being sync’d that was lots and lots of small files. So I decided that as I don’t use it often and as it isn’t very big I could take that out of Nextcloud. This could also help perhaps as well.

nihil21 · May 14, 2021, 1:59pm

That’s strange, I have not received that message. I’m using Manjaro 5.12.

prg99 · May 14, 2021, 2:54pm

I googled it and the only thing that comes up really is the error in the Nextcloud github. I guess I could try to use the source code to figure out what it actually means.

szaimen · May 14, 2021, 2:58pm

What about those values? Did you already try to change them?

prg99 · May 14, 2021, 2:59pm

I thought I would wait to see if moving the data out did anything. If it doesn’t I will change those values as that would be an ok fix for now.

prg99 · May 19, 2021, 10:47am

Moving out that data set of 800,000 small files seems to have solved the problem.

prg99 · May 20, 2021, 6:08pm

Ok, so new development. I don’t think this was anything to do with Nextcloud in the end.

It randomly happened again so I downloaded a script (use at your own risk) that listed all the processes that were watching a lot of files. I discovered that the firmware updating tool for my blackmagic card was running 100s of sessions. Which seems to be the cause of the problem. So annoying.