How does this compare to Chokidar?

[davej]

I wasn't able to form a conclusion from the README of how this differs from Chokidar and in what circumstances I would choose one over the other. A brief comparison would be useful.

[danielbayley]

https://blog.axosoft.com/2017/02/16/nsfw

[AndyOGo]

@danielbayley
May I ask you to mention some benefits over chokidar?

[AndyOGo]

for anyone who is curious
https://www.reddit.com/r/node/comments/4gxscp/stable_release_of_fast_recursive_file_watcher_for/

[ChrisFan]

Chokidar may cause EPERM problem on windows which is likely an issue of fs.watch. Since NSFW is based on Windows's native implementation, so I guess it should avoid this kind of issues ?

[AndyOGo]

@ChrisFan
Thanks for your reply.
Indeed, chokidar on Windows 10 has even more strange issues:

• Windows 10: renaming of an empty folder triggers only once paulmillr/chokidar#593
• Windows 10: creating a new folder and immediatly renameing does not trigger paulmillr/chokidar#592

[kumarharsh]

How does this compare to Watchman? https://github.com/facebook/watchman

One benefit I've seen of watchman over something like node-watch is that watchman is faster and consumes significantly less memory (~10M) even for big projects. Does this library offer something comparable?

[AndyOGo]

@kumarharsh
From my understanding the first obvious distinction is that watchman provides a service, which is then consumed by fb-watchman.
Which leads to two installations:

• one for nodeJS by npm install fb-watchman for watchman's client - https://facebook.github.io/watchman/docs/nodejs.html
• and an OS-dependant installation for watchman's server - https://facebook.github.io/watchman/docs/install.html

And that really no one wants in the node universe. One NPM install should get you what you need.
And that's the case with nsfw, it is specially build for node.

[kumarharsh]

Yeah, I got that, and it is actually rather irritating in the watchman style of installation - but it's still a one-time thing and the installation of watchman server isn't so big an issue for most people.

I wanted to know from a performance perspective, what kind of a memory footprint nsfw has for larger projects - if there's some benchmark for it.

[AndyOGo]

Well, I have never seen a benchmark neither. Just their Axosoft's blog post and the discussion at reddit. Did you read that? It tells you already allot of what makes chokidar slow.

Would be cool if some core contributors could join the discussion?
@implausible @xqp @reneme

[kumarharsh]

The benefit watchman does provide is that the client-server model lets me run webpack, linters, etc all on the same code which won't spawn different watchers everytime - thus not compounding the memory/cpu consumption issue. Of course, any library which doesn't use this kind of architecture can't really offer those kind of performance benefits. So, I just wanted to see how nsfw compared to other node watchers.

I couldn't find any perf benchmarks, but came to know about nsfw via the vscode repo, where a vscode-nsfw was being used in vscode.

[greggman]

watchman having to install an OS level service is entirely a deal breaker for a great many projects.

[leonetosoft]

@AndyOGo
nor compares, nsfw can listen to the directory "C: " without consuming CPU. Try this on chokidar! This is a native package.