Avoiding mass OS notifications with filesystem containing tens of millions of files

[Julian Davchev]

Hello everyone,

Currently we're struggling with an issue where we need to notify the OS of changes to the filesystem (e.g. add/delete/change of file attributes). We're changing a filesystem that contains more than tens of millions of files and sending notification for each file is infeasible.

Is there some way where we can control the granularity of notifications (e.g. per directory, not per file) or even better, be able to invoke a notification once on the whole mount point so that we do not spam the OS with countless notifications. End result should cause e.g. Finder and all other apps that are registered for notifications to properly update their file index on regular intervals so that proper user experience is kept.

Any help is much appreciated.