Filesystem watching?

[joepie91]

Currently, syncthing appears to use periodic polling to become aware of filesystem changes. This is not particularly efficient, and involves a significant trade-off between response time and overhead.

Perhaps you could include support for fanotify or inotify on systems where this functionality is available? I believe that fanotify supports recursive watches, which should keep the overhead to a minimum.

[alex2108]

duplicate of #9 which is closed because it's possible via external scripts that call /rest/scan (see other issue for links to implementations)

[joepie91]

Right. A few remarks on that:

• This should probably at least be documented (in the README?).
• Ideally, a script for this would be included in the syncthing distribution.
• It seems that those notification scripts all use inotify rather than fanotify, which is a problem if you have a lot of nested directories. As a bonus, a Go API exists for fanotify.

[AudriusButkevicius]

So the reason why this is not included is probably because syncthing runs on three different platforms, and the build process for all platforms is just two nested loops.

I agree fanotify would do a better job, and perhaps someone could integrate it to the current watcher, but it requires root privileges which some might be against.

[calmh]

https://github.com/Zillode/syncthing-inotify ought to be of interest

[jpjp]

@joepie91 Come to https://github.com/Zillode/syncthing-inotify/ - patches accepted :)

Edit: too slow!