advice needed before changing inotify max_user_watches

[M. Fioretti]

Greetings,

a while ago, I noticed that on my Fedora box digiKam would not load
and display picture galleries anymore, and when launched from the
prompt would produce this message:

digikam(14981)/digikam (core): Reached inotify limit

which IIUC means this is a general problem on that computer, not
digikam specific.

An online search returned always the same "fix" described e.g. at
http://monodevelop.com/Inotify_watches_limit, that is:
##################################################################
To change the limit, run:

# echo 16384 > /proc/sys/fs/inotify/max_user_watches

To make the change permanent, edit the file /etc/sysctl.conf and add
this line to the end of the file:

fs.inotify.max_user_watches=16384
##################################################################

(the current value now is 8192)

I could not, however, find any clear (to me at least) explanation of
possible unwanted side-effects of this. Should I check/do something
else (but what?) or can I safely apply those suggestions and reboot?
Is there risk that doing that stuff "as is" messes things up and
forces me to spend a day or so recovering the system?

Thanks,
	Marco
-- 

M. Fioretti http://mfioretti.com                   http://stop.zona-m.net

Your own civil rights and the quality of your life heavily depend on how
software is used *around* you