Is it possible to disable Linux inotify watchers?

[emmenlau (Mario Emmenlauer)]

Is it possible to disable inotify watchers completely, to only use regular directory scans?

Motivation: I have folders with a large source code tree that accumulates millions of files. I’m afraid that inotify watchers for this folder are not useful. Even worse, having inotify seems to use up all watchers from all processes.

I have googled for “syncthing disable inotify” and also searched this forum but did not find anything. Sorry if this is obvious but I’ve just started using syncthing and may not know about this…

[Nummer378 (Max)]

Just uncheck “Watch for Changes” in folder settings → Advanced.

It will then fall back to just regular scans in intervals. The interval is configurable on the same page.

Note that if you’re using an additional wrapper (SyncTrayzor or others) those may also use watchers you need to disable.

[emmenlau (Mario Emmenlauer)]

Awesome, thanks! This solves my needs exactly!