Does't watch changes with a large codebase

I am migrating a project from webpack 4 to webpack 5. The project contains a large code base, most of the files are contained in node_modules. After building in dev mode, webpack does not rebuild to file changes, it does not even give an error. After a series of experiments on disabling package imports, at some point the watch mode starts working, because there is less code in build.

When poll:true, watch mode starts working, but rebuild takes extremely long time(about 40 seconds)

I can try set ulimit -n and maxfiles to max values, but that didn’t help.

version: 2.0.0-beta.14 os: macOS 10.15.4

[sokra]

I wasn’t able to reproduce the weird paths in your repro. Probably it’s a MacOS only issue…

But I found some bugs in the recursive watching code path and fixed them in https://github.com/webpack/watchpack/releases/tag/v2.0.0-beta.15 I can’t tell for sure that it fixes your problems, but maybe you can try this release and verify it. There is also a logging mode enabled with WATCHPACK_RECURSIVE_WATCHER_LOGGING=1 env var, which tells you what the recursive watchers do…

[WaveString]

Interesting, very interesting, maybe some plugin do it, what is plugins do you use?

For this case, I created a test repository, these paths are reproduced https://github.com/WaveString/webpack-5-example