I am working on a small NodeJS application that essentially serves as a browser based desktop search for a LAN based server that multiples users can query. The users on the LAN all have access to a shared folder on that server and are traditionally used to just placing files within that folder to sharing among everyone, and I want to keep that process the same.
The first solution I came across was the fs.watchFile which has been touched on in other stackoverflow questions. In the first question user Ivo Wetzel noted that on a linux system fs.watchFile uses inotify but, was of the opinion that fs.watchFile should not be used for large amounts of files/folders.
In another question about fs.watchFile user tjameson first reiterated that on Linux inotify would be used by fs.fileWatch and recommended to just use a combination of node-inotify-plusplus and node-walk but again stated this method should not be used for a large number of files. With a comment and response he suggested only watching the modified times of directories and then rescanning the relevant directory for file changes.
My biggest hurdles seem to be that even with tjameson's suggestion there is still a hard limit to the number of folders monitored (of which there are many and growing). Also it would have to be done recursively because the directory tree is somewhat deep and can also be subject to change at the lo