[Arch Linux] [Manjaro] How to avoid "Visual Studio Code is unable to watch for file changes in this large workspace" (error ENOSPC)

inotify-instructions.md

To avoid this error, we need to increase the inotify watcher limit.

The way to do this is different on Arch based distributions than other Linux distributions.

Instructions for Arch Linux/Manjaro

Check for an already existing inotify config file (recent versions of Manjaro include one)

ls /etc/sysctl.d/*-max_user_watches.conf

a) If no output

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

b) If the command outputs a file

(in the rare case where it outputs multiple files, continue using the last one in the list)

# replace `/etc/sysctl.d/50-max_user_watches.conf` with the file returned from the previous `ls` command
echo fs.inotify.max_user_watches=524288 | sudo tee /etc/sysctl.d/50-max_user_watches.conf && sudo sysctl --system

Check it's working

cat /proc/sys/fs/inotify/max_user_watches

Expected output: 524288

Credits

• inotify og dev
• explanation and troubleshooting
• manjaro fix original

OK thanks for the reply. The two events were associated by temporal locality. I received the notification from VS Code ~30 s after applying the fstab change & remount. Thus my human brain decided that the two events were associated in a causal relationship.

I think your problem is unlikely to have anything to do with this particular situation. Presumably the qwen info it gave you was slightly incorrect

Not surprised- I ended up reverting the "optimizations" to fstab not very long after I made them. The volume in question (mounted as /) is a RAID 10 of 4 x Samsung 970 Evo SSDs. Which is what prompted her to recommend those settings.