Re: Nautilus Refresh

[Tomas Bzatek <tbzatek redhat com>]

On Mon, 2009-07-27 at 10:30 -0700, Mike Rooney wrote:
> On Mon, Jul 27, 2009 at 1:31 AM, Tomas Bzatek<tbzatek redhat com> wrote:
> > There has been some work done on symlink monitoring but eventually we
> > found out it is too expensive and never committed the code upstream.
> >
> > http://bugzilla.gnome.org/show_bug.cgi?id=536172
> > http://bugzilla.gnome.org/show_bug.cgi?id=546954


> Interesting, this sounds cool. I am surprised however that in the case
> of 546954 using inotify is too expensive. I would have thought the
> only expense is handling the signal and refreshing the view and there
> wouldn't be an overhead when symlinks aren't being modified.  Is this
> not true? Perhaps I don't understand inotify fully.
In very basic scenario this is true, but we need to cover every possible
combination of symlink pointing to another symlink etc. and this starts
to be expensive. In extreme case this may lead to exhaustion of inotify
slots, whose number is globally limited and shared across all
applications (namely Tracker or Beagle?). See bug 536172 for scenarios
described.

> Either way it is great to know of this patch, if it still applies I
> can at least have a custom version to throw in a PPA with my extension
> and have it be functional.
You need both parts, GIO and Nautilus patches for this to work. And of
course it's untested and there are known flaws (monitoring on NFS).

-- 
Tomas Bzatek <tbzatek redhat com>