This is on a CentOS 7 NAS. The files are getting written to it over an NFS share, but watching on the NAS file system side. Kernel 3.10.0-1160.59.1.el7.x86_64. The python inotify has no issues it seems. We might switch to inotifywait like @choroba says and like another dept at $work uses. Or switch to C or Go. Very strange. Again, we get all the events and it feels like they are flushed to us. I might ditch retry and go to ->read. We're playing with the python version to pop UUIDs into a Redis FIFO/queue and move find_call_details() and email_recording() into separate program to speak to Redis.