Real time monitoring/indexing is performed by starting
the recollindex -m command. With this
option, recollindex will permanently monitor file changes and update the
index.
On Windows systems, the monitoring process is started from the recoll GUI File menu. On Unix-like systems, there are other possibilities, see the following sections.
When this is in use, the recoll GUI menu makes two operations available: and .
has the same effect as restarting the indexer, and will cause a complete walk of the indexed area, processing the changed files, then switch to monitoring. This is only marginally useful, maybe in cases where the indexer is configured to delay updates, or to force an immediate rebuild of the stemming and phonetic data, which are only processed at intervals by the real time indexer.
While it is convenient that data is indexed in real time, repeated indexing can generate a significant load on the system when files such as email folders change. Also, monitoring large file trees by itself significantly taxes system resources. You probably do not want to enable it if your system is short on resources. Periodic indexing is adequate in most cases.
As of Recoll 1.24, you can set the monitordirs configuration variable to specify that only a subset of your indexed files will be monitored for instant indexing. In this situation, an incremental pass on the full tree can be triggered by either restarting the indexer, or just running recollindex, which will notify the running process. The recoll GUI also has a menu entry for this.
The installation contains two example files
(in share/recoll/examples) for starting the indexing daemon with
systemd.
recollindex.service would be used for
starting recollindex as a user service.
The indexer will start when the user logs in and run while there is a session open for
them.
recollindex@.service is a template service which would be used
for starting the indexer at boot time, running as a specific user. It can be useful when
running the text search as a shared service (e.g. when users access it through the WEB
UI).
If configured to do so, the unit files should have been installed in your system's
default systemd paths (usually /usr/lib/systemd/system/ and
/usr/lib/systemd/user/). If not, you may need to copy the files
there before starting the service.
With the unit files installed in the proper location, the user unit can be started with the following commands:
systemctl --user daemon-reload systemctl --user enable --now recollindex.service
The system unit file can be enabled for a particular user by running, as root:
systemctl daemon-reload
systemctl enable --now recollindex@username.service(A valid user name should be substituted for username, of
course.)
Under KDE,
Gnome and some other desktop
environments, the daemon can automatically started when you log
in, by creating a desktop file inside the
~/.config/autostart directory. This can be
done for you by the Recoll GUI. Use the
menu.
With older X11 setups, starting the daemon is normally performed as part of the user session script.
The rclmon.sh script can be used to
easily start and stop the daemon. It can be found in the
examples directory (typically
/usr/local/[share/]recoll/examples).
For example, a good old xdm-based
session could have a .xsession script with the
following lines at the end:
recollconf=$HOME/.recoll-home recolldata=/usr/local/share/recoll RECOLL_CONFDIR=$recollconf $recolldata/examples/rclmon.sh start fvwm
The indexing daemon gets started, then the window manager, for which the session waits.
By default the indexing daemon will monitor the state of the X11
session, and exit when it finishes, it is not necessary to kill it
explicitly. (The X11 server monitoring can be disabled with
option -x to
recollindex).
If you use the daemon completely out of an
X11 session, you need to add option
-x to disable X11
session monitoring (else the daemon will not start).
Logging. By default, the messages from the indexing daemon will be
sent to the same file as those from the interactive commands
(logfilename). You may want to change this
by setting the daemlogfilename and
daemloglevel configuration parameters. Also
the log file will only be truncated when the daemon starts. If
the daemon runs permanently, the log file may grow quite big,
depending on the log level.
Unix-like systems: increasing resources for inotify. On Linux systems, monitoring a big tree may need
increasing the resources available to inotify, which are
normally defined in /etc/sysctl.conf.
### inotify # # cat /proc/sys/fs/inotify/max_queued_events - 16384 # cat /proc/sys/fs/inotify/max_user_instances - 128 # cat /proc/sys/fs/inotify/max_user_watches - 16384 # # -- Change to: # fs.inotify.max_queued_events=32768 fs.inotify.max_user_instances=256 fs.inotify.max_user_watches=32768
Especially, you will need to trim your tree or adjust
the max_user_watches value if indexing exits with
a message about errno ENOSPC (28) from
inotify_add_watch.
Slowing down the reindexing rate for fast changing files. When using the real time monitor, it may happen that some
files need to be indexed, but change so often that they impose an excessive load for
the system. Recoll provides a configuration option to specify the minimum time before
which a file, specified by a wildcard pattern, cannot be reindexed. See the
mondelaypatterns parameter in the configuration
section.
