Debian 9 - Seafile Causing Sound To Not Work

In my switch from Ubuntu to Debian, I noticed that my sound suddenly stopped working. I only managed to figure it out when I ran:

pulseaudio

... and got the following error output:

E: [pulseaudio] module-udev-detect.c: You apparently ran out of inotify watches, probably because ...

Seafile uses inotify to watch for files changing so the problem/resolution became clear. I had set seafile to launch on startup which must have caused the issue. Rather than stop seafile launching on startup, I just need to increate the max number of watches.

Thus I edited the root crontab file:

sudo crontab -e

And added the following line:

@reboot echo 100000000000000 | sudo tee /proc/sys/fs/inotify/max_user_watches

I then rebooted to test that this fixed the issue, which it did. I hope that this might save someone else some pain in the future.

References

• programster.blogspot.co.uk - Nautilus Not Updating