Description
watch is deprecated per the watchman docs: https://facebook.github.io/watchman/docs/cmd/watch.html
it should be replaced with watch-project: https://facebook.github.io/watchman/docs/cmd/watch-project.html
The latter has the big advantage of not creating redundant watches for subdirectories. When I looked at watchman watch-list on my machine I had ~20 watches, all of which were subdirectories of my home directory. The daemon was using ~1.6GB of memory (I have about 1.5M files in my homedir).
I did watchman watch-del-all, killed the daemon, then did watchman watch-project $HOME, the current memory usage is 571MB.
The downside is you have to change how you do queries, you have to supply the "real" root returned from watch-project and put the subdirectory in the expression. It seems to me that watchman could easily split the path itself to allow existing queries to continue to work.
So, for instance:
$ watchman watch-project $HOME
{
"version": "2022.06.13.00",
"watch": "/Users/todd",
"watcher": "fsevents"
}
$ watchman watch-project $HOME/subdir
{
"version": "2022.06.13.00",
"relative_path": "subdir",
"watch": "/Users/todd",
"watcher": "fsevents"
}
then, instead of using this query: ["query", "/Users/todd/subdir", { "expression": ["type", "f"], "fields": ["name"]}]
we have to do ["query", "/Users/todd", { "expression": ["allof", ["dirname", "subdir"], ["type", "f"]], "fields": ["name"]}]
and, annoyingly, strip subdir/ from the results.