Missing inotify events

Missing inotify events

[Marc Giger]

Hello,

I have a Java application which writes multiple files in a short period of time. When I watch the
filechanges with inotifywait sometimes events are missing. To find out what's going on I straced
the java application to see if the files are e.g. properly closed:

26467 open("/tmp/refapps2/20051002/giger/documents/891877A1C3FB7CEA477B/1332340770691_Ping_unknown_TransmitterRequestRaw_UTF-8.xml", O_WRONLY|O_CREAT|O_TRUNC, 0666) = 804
26467 close(804)                        = 0
26467 open("/tmp/refapps2/20051002/giger/documents/891877A1C3FB7CEA477B/1332340770728_PingResponse_unknown_TransmitterResponseRaw_UTF-8.xml", O_WRONLY|O_CREAT|O_TRUNC, 0666) = 805
26467 close(805)

inotifywait reports:

/tmp/refapps2/20051002/giger/documents/ CREATE,ISDIR 891877A1C3FB7CEA477B
/tmp/refapps2/20051002/giger/documents/ OPEN,ISDIR 891877A1C3FB7CEA477B
/tmp/refapps2/20051002/giger/documents/ CLOSE_NOWRITE,CLOSE,ISDIR 891877A1C3FB7CEA477B
/tmp/refapps2/20051002/giger/documents/891877A1C3FB7CEA477B/ CREATE 1332340770728_PingResponse_unknown_TransmitterResponseRaw_UTF-8.xml
/tmp/refapps2/20051002/giger/documents/891877A1C3FB7CEA477B/ OPEN 1332340770728_PingResponse_unknown_TransmitterResponseRaw_UTF-8.xml
/tmp/refapps2/20051002/giger/documents/891877A1C3FB7CEA477B/ MODIFY 1332340770728_PingResponse_unknown_TransmitterResponseRaw_UTF-8.xml
/tmp/refapps2/20051002/giger/documents/891877A1C3FB7CEA477B/ CLOSE_WRITE,CLOSE 1332340770728_PingResponse_unknown_TransmitterResponseRaw_UTF-8.xml

This behavior can be repeated easily, but not that easy when running the app under strace (timing issue?).

I would expect that I get _all_ events as long as the event-queue is not full. No?

Ubuntu Kernel 2.6.32-37-server and also vanilla-kernel 3.2.6 running gentoo behave the same way.


Marc