Wcpkernel gobbling up inotify instances?

[David_Law]

What product/components do you use and which version/fix level are you on?

Entire Network Version=7.9.1.0 Patch Level=0

Is your question related to the free trial, or to a production (customer) instance?

Production @ Customer Site

What are you trying to achieve? Please describe it in detail.

We have a Java process that wants to register just ONE!! (Java WatchService) but fails because…
…wcpkernel is grabbing nearly all inotify instances
(inotify is a Unix mechanism to Monitor File-System Events)
We doubled the max yesterday to 256 & this morning wcpkernel had grabbed over 200 of them.

Do you get any error messages? Please provide a full error message screenshot and log file.

lsof | grep inotify | wc -l
yields.: 256
Further analysis shows most of the inotify instances were caused by 2 wcpkernel PID’s

Java Exception:
java.io.IOException: User limit of inotify instances reached or too many open files

Have you installed all the latest fixes for the products and systems you are using?

Entire Network Version=7.9.1.0 Patch Level=0

[Douglas_Kelly]

what Unix/Linux are you using? Are you very limited on memory? On a default install of RHEL 8.6, “cat /proc/sys/fs/inotify/max_user_watches” shows 120308; another RHEL 7.7 shows 8192. 256 might just be too small? If you increase your max_user_watches to (for example) 8192, does WCP consume more than ~200 inotify instances?