How to limit virtualenv file watches to prevent large workspace error

[ggydush-fn]

I have all of my virtual environments in a single folder (~/.virtualenvs/) and found that this causes the following issue in Vscode (even in an empty project):

Unable to watch for file changes in this large workspace folder. Please follow the instructions link to resolve this issue.

The logs show that the Python extension is watching the ~/.virtualenvs directory, but does it need to watch all files in these directories? When working on multiple projects, this can easily exceed the watcher limit (which I don't have much control over setting, as I'm operating on a remote machine).

Disabling the Python extension resolves, but am wondering if anyone else has come across this and knows a way around it? I've tried modifying Vscode's setting "files.watcherExclude" but that did not seem to have an effect.

[brettcannon]

How many environments do you have in that directory? And this comes from Pylance as we don't monitor for file changes outside of your workspace.

[ggydush-fn]

Currently I have >10 environments in that directory (have not narrowed down how many environments are needed for this issue to crop up, but it's been reported by a few coworkers)! Maybe this is an uncommon usage pattern?

These were the logs that led me to the Python extension:

[2022-06-27 15:12:08.121] [window] [trace] MainThreadFileSystem#$watch(): request to start watching (extension: ms-python.python, path: /home/ggydush/.virtualenvs, recursive: false, session: 0.6867288043931619)
[2022-06-27 15:12:08.145] [window] [trace] MainThreadFileSystem#$watch(): request to start watching (extension: ms-python.python, path: /home/ggydush/.virtualenvs, recursive: true, session: 0.35131900346432365)
[2022-06-27 15:12:08.170] [window] [trace] MainThreadFileSystem#$watch(): request to start watching (extension: ms-python.python, path: /home/ggydush/.virtualenvs, recursive: true, session: 0.9384963542621043)

[ggydush-fn]

I should also note, I'm not using the Pylance extension!

[brettcannon]

I've gone ahead and converted this to an issue at #19622 .