Editing project over NFS
Hello,
I have a new development setup on MacOS with all my project on a fast NFS server. I noticed the "External files changes sync may be slow" warning, but IntelliJ does not do a good job explaining me what functionality will not work. I can imagine that inotify (or similar FS notify API) is not available over network, question remains what can I run into.
Is there some way to measure performance of this feature? My NFS server is on 40gbps connection (Thunderbolt bridge) on a decent SSD. I guess this will depend on how big the project is, yeah, I do have a huge projects to work with.
Can I turn off the file watching feature completely?
My concern is, I would like to test somehow how this performs on bigger projects before I fully commit to this NFS setup.
Thanks
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> "External files changes sync may be slow"
This means that IDEA will not be able to instantly detect changes under your project, because of native system file watcher process (fsnotifier) does not support mounted network drives. See http://blog.jetbrains.com/idea/2010/04/native-file-system-watcher-for-linux for some info about fsnotifier for linux (it serves the same purpose on all operating systems).
> Can I turn off the file watching feature completely?
If you want to get rid of this warning you can remove fsnotifier binary from
IDEA_HOME/bindirectory and add -Didea.filewatcher.disabled=true in Help | Edit Custom VM Options and restart the IDE.Thank you Egor, this is exactly what I already know (as a software engineer).
My question is more about IntelliJ products, what features exactly do I miss when this is not working or turned off?
If that's just the editor will not detect a file change and I could accidentally overwrite a file when saving, then I am okay. But I am wondering if there are other (more complex) features which will not work correctly.
Cheers!
Disabling fsnotifier will only affect the speed of loading external changes. You will often see the Synchronizing files spinner.
You can also completely disable synchronization by unchecking (Synchronize external changes when switching to the IDE window or opening an editor tab) under (Settings / Preferences | Appearance & Behavior | System Settings), and load changes manually. (File | Reload All from Disk)
Be aware each access to a file or directory on a network drive adds a small latency, so we recommend storing the project files locally.