How to increase inotify limit for syncthing?

[canadaduane]

I'm seeing the following warning/error message in my hosted syncthing web page:

Filesystem Watcher Errors

For the following folders an error occurred while starting to watch for changes. It will be retried every minute, so the errors might go away soon. If they persist, try to fix the underlying issue and ask for help if you can't.

Support Sync
failed to setup inotify handler. Please increase inotify limits, see https://docs.syncthing.net/users/faq.html#inotify-limits

Does this need to be modified on the host, or within docker? What is the recommended way to do this?

[girish]

@canadaduane The inotify configuration is not a namespaced/container level configuration. It's value is global and comes from the host. So, you can change it manually on your server using sysctl -w fs.inotify.max_user_watches=204800 . To persist the setting across reboots, echo "fs.inotify.max_user_watches=204800" | sudo tee -a /etc/sysctl.conf

[canadaduane]

@girish Thank you, this did the trick. In my case, I have Ubuntu 20.04 on a kvm inside my host, so I had to change the inotify watch limit for the "inner host". The warning message went away a few minutes after that.