Too many open files - Failed to initialize inotify: the user limit on the total number of inotify instances has been reached.

[cordawyn]

Every now and then [guard] fails to start with the following message:

11:21:41 - INFO - Guard is now watching at '/home/cordawyn/Projects/test'
/home/cordawyn/.rvm/gems/ruby-1.9.3-p327-turbo/gems/rb-inotify-0.8.8/lib/rb-inotify/notifier.rb:66:in `initialize': Too many open files - Failed to initialize inotify: the user limit on the total number of inotify instances has been reached. (Errno::EMFILE)

This happens after returning the computer (notebook) from sleep mode, then launching guard (on a Rails project). To make things worse, it is not 100% reproducible (I'd say, around 80% of attempts).

I figure this might not be exactly rb-notify's bug, but rather that of either inotify or a million other kernel subsystems, but guard+rb-notify seems to be the only combo that manages to surface this issue. If you could point me to a more appropriate responsible party, it would be much appreciated ;-)

[nex3]

I don't know who the right person to talk to about this, but I also don't know of anything we can do in rb-inotify to solve the issue 😕. Sorry.

[sevenseacat]

anything we can do to fix the problem would be nice :/ it happens to me randomly and persists until I reboot my computer.

[hron]

I've just stumbled upon the same problem. I think this issue could be not relate to rb-inotify, but the tools we use on our computers. I just tried to increase a limit of user instances. Here is the link with more info:

http://unix.stackexchange.com/questions/13751/kernel-inotify-watch-limit-reached

I had to increase this:

echo 256 > /proc/sys/fs/inotify/max_user_instances

[deric]

thanks @hron it solved the issue for me

[sevenseacat]

not for me, unfortunately - I still get the error. Oh well.

[zewelor]

@Karpah echo 256 > /proc/sys/fs/inotify/max_user_instances , try to increase the value, i got now 600, before 512 was working good, it looks like each time I restart guard ( kill and start again ) I had to increase it (?)

[zewelor]

I found that quote here: http://irclog.whitequark.org/ruby-lang/2012-03-29

16:11 <Defusal> now i can't even test anymore, rb-inotifier does not automatically close inotify handles, so if you dont manually do it, such as when the app doesn't exit cleanly, the handles are left open on the kernel forever...
16:11 <Defusal> so now its maxed out my user limit for inotify
16:11 <Defusal> Exception: Too many open files - Failed to initialize inotify: the user limit on the total number of inotify instances has been reached.
16:13 <Defusal> so between EventMachine crashing ruby and rb-inotifier, it's really screwed me over

[nex3]

I'm surprised that the OS doesn't clean up handles that are held by processes that have died. I'm not aware of a way to clean them up manually in the face of the process crashing.

[srusskih]

Hi
Are there any news about the issue?

[nex3]

I'm still unaware of any way to handle this in rb-inotify itself.

[srusskih]

I catch this issue when my PC had been worked for a week with turned guard on and without reboot.
Also we can compare libs/kernel versions

[paradisaeidae]

I suspect the Linux kernel header for inotify has changed, so the inotify.so needs a recompile?
I am trying to find inotify.c to recompile it.
Though I do not see it in this repo.
Any clues?

[paradisaeidae]

Could not find inotify.c so moving to: https://github.com/nex3/rb-inotify

[kokizzu]

yup, that solves my issues

# increase inotify file watch limit
ofile=/proc/sys/fs/inotify/max_user_instances
sudo sh -c "echo 8192 > $ofile"
cat $ofile
rerun app.rb

[ShuangxuQiu]

I've just stumbled upon the same problem. I think this issue could be not relate to rb-inotify, but the tools we use on our computers. I just tried to increase a limit of user instances. Here is the link with more info:

http://unix.stackexchange.com/questions/13751/kernel-inotify-watch-limit-reached

I had to increase this:

echo 256 > /proc/sys/fs/inotify/max_user_instances

works for me,thx