Re: Remove all existing file notification watches from Emacs

[Stefan Monnier <monnier@iro.umontreal.ca>]

>> [ Personally I'd put a `--` in its name and/or add some blurb in the
>> docstring explaining it's only for debugging.  ]
>
> Nope.  There have been bug reports in the past, that Emacs was stalled
> after creating hundreds of file notifications. One solution is to
> stop/restart Emacs.  The other solution is this command.

That qualifies as debugging for me ;-)

I mean, using this instead of restarting Emacs may work sometimes, but
it can have undesirable (and hard to predict, for the end user) side
effects since packages have had their watches killed from under them.

So it's OK to use when the alternative is to kill Emacs, but it should
come with some warnings (in a pessimistic scenario I can see some blog
mentioning this command alongside the usual "set your GC threshold super
high" and a few other things, in the toolbox of "make your Emacs more
faster").


        Stefan