lambdaisland / lambdaisland/classpath

watch-deps watches (and hashes) all files in project

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#7 1 comment 0 reactions 0 assignees View on GitHub

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enhancement help wanted
Dominant language
Clojure
Stars
90
Forks
7
PR merge metrics
No merged PRs in 30d

Description

The default behaviors of https://github.com/nextjournal/beholder and https://github.com/gmethvin/directory-watcher cause watched folders to register watches on all subfolders recursively, and 'watching' a folder reads and hashes every file within it at startup and rehashes any created/modified files on every modification. Due to this, the DirectoryWatcher created by watch-deps is reading and hashing everything under the project folder recursively (including .git, node_modules, etc) and rehashing all modified files even though the callback registered by watch-deps ultimately ignores everything but modifications to deps.edn. This can cause a long delay when watch-deps is invoked for projects with large numbers of files or just large files (e.g. data files under resources/) due the hashing on startup, and unnecessary resource usage caused by rehashing every git commit, asset file update, etc.

DirectoryWatcher can be configured not to hash or to use the file modified timestamp instead of hashing, but these options are not exposed by beholder. It doesn't appear to be possible to watch a single folder without its children using DirectoryWatcher

Would a PR that uses the native java.nio.file.WatchService directly instead of beholder/DirectoryWatcher be welcome? It appears the downside would be that WatchService uses a polling implementation on MacOS, but since it would be possible to watch the project root without any children, I would think it would still be a net win for performance.

Contributor guide

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First steps

  1. Read the whole issue, then the project's contributing guide.
  2. Comment on the issue to say you are picking it up — it saves two people doing the same work.
  3. Fork the repository and make your change on a branch.
  4. Open a pull request that references the issue number.

Research direction

Start at the DirectoryWatcher created by watch-deps and review how beholder and directory-watcher currently register recursive watches and hash files. Compare that behavior with java.nio.file.WatchService; done should avoid scanning and rehashing unrelated project files while still detecting modifications to deps.edn.

Written by the indexing model from the issue text.

Assessment

Tech stack
clojure, java
Domain
performance, tooling
Issue type
Bug
Difficulty
4/5
Estimated time
3-5 days
Activity status
Stale
Clarity
Mostly clear
Newbie friendliness
35/100

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