Android Studio shows the warning inotify limit is too low

Question

Every time on start Android studio displays a warning.

The current inotify(7) watch limit is too low.

I don't understand what it is all about. Should I be worried about it ? If anyone can clear about the concept of this watch limit I would be very thankful .

Answer 1

According to the IntelliJ documentation,

For an intelligent IDE it is essential to be in the know about any external changes in files it working with - e.g. changes made by VCS, or build tools, or code generators etc. For that reason, IntelliJ platform spins background process to monitor such changes.

Inotify requires a "watch handle" to be set for each directory in the project. Unfortunately, the default limit of watch handles may not be enough for reasonably sized projects, and reaching the limit will force IntelliJ platform to fall back to recursive scans of directory trees.

Therefore, you need to add

fs.inotify.max_user_watches = 524288 

in "/etc/sysctl.conf"

and then run the following command for it to take effect

sudo sysctl -p 

Let me know if this helps !

Answer 2

Here's the clean and easy copy-and-paste fix:

1. Simply copy-and-paste this multi-line command into your shell. It will create the file /etc/sysctl.d/android-studio.conf which will apply the necessary inotify limits upon every system startup:

    cat << EOF | sudo tee /etc/sysctl.d/android-studio.conf  # Increase inotify limit, required by Android Studio, https://confluence.jetbrains.com/display/IDEADEV/Inotify+Watches+Limit  fs.inotify.max_user_watches = 524288  EOF 

2. Reload your new sysclt configuration file (and all the others):

    sudo sysctl -p --system 

3. Restart Android Studio.

Here's the IntelliJ documentation for completeness: https://confluence.jetbrains.com/display/IDEADEV/Inotify+Watches+Limit