Comment # 3 on bug 1222946 from Alexander Krupp

Created attachment 874522 [details]
output of inotify-consumers script with active unison

Same script as mentioned in comment 1, this now with unison load active.
Situation in is a system workload on a normal working day. 

171 inotify instances active - and no single massive consumer in sight. Okular
and akonadi could be somewhat in focus. 

Seems to me as if Unison erroring out has been the symptom, but not the cause. 

BTW, the Unison developers claim that as they only use 1 instance at most, it
is not their responsibility to deal with a lack of resources on the OS. The
problem with Unison was a misleading error message, which they fixed. Bug is
linked. 

In this light, and given the number above I wonder how many of the listed
instance consumers do not produce error messages at all, if instances are
exhausted? 

The only program producing an error has been Unison. I am sure with current
settings I will hit ~200 instances with IDEs open. I do not even have Eclipse
or Intellij open during the above snapshot. 

If not for general use, at least with a desktop (KDE?) profile it may make
sense to raise the limit, if you have a mechanism for that.