fsnotify watcher uses too much memory

(sorry for bad english)

i am working on a file watcher that will monitor the entire C:\Users tree. but its using too much RAM(around 10 GB). i think there is a memory leak.

i am using "github.com/fsnotify/fsnotify" and path/filepath libraries.

the watcher only watches create and remove events, i ran filepath.WalkDir() without watcher adding the directories and its not the problem.

go func() {//handling events
    for {
        select {
        case event, ok := <-watcher.Events:
            if !ok {
                return
            }
            if event.Has(fsnotify.Create) {
                log.Println("file created: ", event.Name)
            } else if event.Has(fsnotify.Remove) {
                log.Println("file removed: ", event.Name)
            }
        case err, ok := <-watcher.Errors:
            if !ok {
                return
            }
            log.Println("error:", err)
        }
    }
}()

var info fs.FileInfo 
var err1 error 
err = filepath.WalkDir("C:\\Users", func(path string, di fs.DirEntry, err error) error {    
    info, err1 = os.Stat(path)  
    if err1 != nil {        
        log.Print("os.Stat error:")         
        log.Println(err)    
    }   
    if info.IsDir() {       
        err1 = watcher.Add(path)        
        if err1 != nil {            
            log.Println("watcher.add error: ", path)            
            log.Println(err1)       
        }   
    }   
    return nil 
}) 
if err != nil {     
    log.Fatalf("error with walkdir: %v", err) 
} 
log.Println("DONE") 
<-make(chan struct{})

There's no memory leak, it's just that you're using fsnotify, which on Windows allocates a 64KB buffer per watched path. See: https://github.com/fsnotify/fsnotify/blob/v1.7.0/backend_windows.go#L274

You're watching 163902 paths (according to your comments), and 163902 * 64KB is very close to 10GB.

You can configure a smaller buffer size (the minimum is 4KB) using watcher.AddWith(path, fsnotify.WithBufferSize(4096)) instead of watcher.Add(path). The documentation suggests that this will increase the chance of an event overflow (fsnotify.ErrEventOverflow) if there's a "large burst of events", which may or may not be a problem for your use-case.