Gnome Tracker (tracker-miner-fs-3) behaving badly

Gnome Tracker (tracker-miner-fs-3) behaving badly

[Ben Sturmfels via]

Hi Folks!

I really like the idea of Gnome Tracker - index all your files,
contacts, etc. so you can quickly search them. It just doesn't seem to
work properly, it uses a lot of resources and it's behaviour is
opaque. I'm not sure whether this is the configuration in Guix System,
or whether Tracker just isn't well designed. My hunch is that it's a
design problem. Does anyone have good/bad experience with Tracker
outside of Guix?

Specific issues:

 * the tracker-miner-fs-3 process runs spontaneously consuming at least
   one CPU for a few minutes (I haven't kept track of how long or how
   often)

 * after all this scanning, searching in Gnome Activities doesn't
   display any matches for the *contents* of files, only the filenames -
   I thought indexing the contents was the whole point

 * when it's busy, tracker-miner-fs-3 seems to ignore `kill` (SIGTERM)
   and needs `kill -9` (SIGKILL) to kill it

 * it's not clear exactly what files Tracker is indexing - there doesn't
   appear to be a log - I'd really like to be able to just `tail -f` to
   see what's going on

I'd like to also understand how tracker-miner-fs-3 is started by
Gnome. It seems to start automatically and restart after some time if
killed. It doesn't seem to be listed under "Startup Applications" in
Gnome Tweak Tool.

Debugging Tracker:

After killing it with `pkill --full tracker-miner-fs-3 --echo`, I can
restart it with some debugging information using:

env TRACKER_DEBUG=config,miner-fs-events,monitors,statistics,status /gnu/store/[...]-tracker-miners-3.3.1/libexec/tracker-miner-fs-3

This seems to show some scheduling information about the indexing, but
not exactly what it's indexing.

Regards,
Ben

Re: Gnome Tracker (tracker-miner-fs-3) behaving badly

[Tobias Geerinckx-Rice]

Tracker logging every file it sees wouldn't be a good idea: apart from the wasted space, you'd be adding even more I/O load to the mix...

Try stracing (guix install strace) tracker's PID(s) instead.  It will generate more output than you need, but file names should be obvious, and you can use grep to further filter the output.

Kind regards,

T G-R

Sent on the go.  Excuse or enjoy my brevity.

Re: Gnome Tracker (tracker-miner-fs-3) behaving badly

[Ben Sturmfels via]

Ben Sturmfels

Sturm Software Engineering
www.sturm.com.au
+61 3 9024 2467

Tobias Geerinckx-Rice <me@tobias.gr> writes:

> Tracker logging every file it sees wouldn't be a good idea: apart from the wasted space, you'd be adding even more I/O load to the mix...
>
> Try stracing (guix install strace) tracker's PID(s) instead.  It will generate more output than you need, but file names should be obvious, and you can use grep to further filter the output.

Thanks Tobias, I'll give strace a shot. Regarding th logging - I'm not
entirely convinced that this would be a space/performance issue for most
use-cases, such as this personal/work laptop with email, code, photos
and media. I wouldn't expect to be generating new files or modifying
existing files at such a rate that the logging would create a problem,
and log rotation would take care of the wasted space eventually.

Regards,
Ben

Re: Gnome Tracker (tracker-miner-fs-3) behaving badly

[Ekaitz Zarraga]

Hi,


------- Original Message -------
On Thursday, August 18th, 2022 at 2:50 AM, Ben Sturmfels via <help-guix@gnu.org> wrote:


> Hi Folks!
> 
> I really like the idea of Gnome Tracker - index all your files,
> contacts, etc. so you can quickly search them. It just doesn't seem to
> work properly, it uses a lot of resources and it's behaviour is
> opaque. I'm not sure whether this is the configuration in Guix System,
> or whether Tracker just isn't well designed. My hunch is that it's a
> design problem. Does anyone have good/bad experience with Tracker
> outside of Guix?
> 
> Specific issues:
> 
> * the tracker-miner-fs-3 process runs spontaneously consuming at least
> one CPU for a few minutes (I haven't kept track of how long or how
> often)
> 
> * after all this scanning, searching in Gnome Activities doesn't
> display any matches for the contents of files, only the filenames -
> I thought indexing the contents was the whole point
> 
> * when it's busy, tracker-miner-fs-3 seems to ignore `kill` (SIGTERM)
> and needs `kill -9` (SIGKILL) to kill it
> 
> * it's not clear exactly what files Tracker is indexing - there doesn't
> appear to be a log - I'd really like to be able to just `tail -f` to
> see what's going on
> 
> I'd like to also understand how tracker-miner-fs-3 is started by
> Gnome. It seems to start automatically and restart after some time if
> killed. It doesn't seem to be listed under "Startup Applications" in
> Gnome Tweak Tool.
> 
> Debugging Tracker:
> 
> After killing it with `pkill --full tracker-miner-fs-3 --echo`, I can
> restart it with some debugging information using:
> 
> env TRACKER_DEBUG=config,miner-fs-events,monitors,statistics,status /gnu/store/[...]-tracker-miners-3.3.1/libexec/tracker-miner-fs-3
> 
> This seems to show some scheduling information about the indexing, but
> not exactly what it's indexing.
> 
> Regards,
> Ben


I experienced a very similar situation.
I hate hen it happens. Every time I move a file or I rename something the thing starts to run and my cpu goes crazy.
On the other hand, this is a recent problem, in previous versions it didn't happen and I didn't really have more effort searching for files in nautilus or similar applications. For me, it's just bad.

Also, I don't use GNOME directly, even if I have it installed and use most of its apps, I run an i3 session, but tracker-miner is still running.

I don't know if that helps.

If I could, I'd like to remove it.

Is it possible?

Thanks,
Ekaitz

Re: Gnome Tracker (tracker-miner-fs-3) behaving badly

[indieterminacy]

On 18-08-2022 11:08, Ekaitz Zarraga wrote:
> Hi,
> 
> 
> ------- Original Message -------
> On Thursday, August 18th, 2022 at 2:50 AM, Ben Sturmfels via 
> <help-guix@gnu.org> wrote:
> 
> 
>> Hi Folks!
>> 
>> I really like the idea of Gnome Tracker - index all your files,
>> contacts, etc. so you can quickly search them. It just doesn't seem to
>> work properly, it uses a lot of resources and it's behaviour is
>> opaque. I'm not sure whether this is the configuration in Guix System,
>> or whether Tracker just isn't well designed. My hunch is that it's a
>> design problem. Does anyone have good/bad experience with Tracker
>> outside of Guix?
>> 
>> Specific issues:
>> 
>> * the tracker-miner-fs-3 process runs spontaneously consuming at least
>> one CPU for a few minutes (I haven't kept track of how long or how
>> often)
>> 
>> * after all this scanning, searching in Gnome Activities doesn't
>> display any matches for the contents of files, only the filenames -
>> I thought indexing the contents was the whole point
>> 
>> * when it's busy, tracker-miner-fs-3 seems to ignore `kill` (SIGTERM)
>> and needs `kill -9` (SIGKILL) to kill it
>> 
>> * it's not clear exactly what files Tracker is indexing - there 
>> doesn't
>> appear to be a log - I'd really like to be able to just `tail -f` to
>> see what's going on
>> 
>> I'd like to also understand how tracker-miner-fs-3 is started by
>> Gnome. It seems to start automatically and restart after some time if
>> killed. It doesn't seem to be listed under "Startup Applications" in
>> Gnome Tweak Tool.
>> 
>> Debugging Tracker:
>> 
>> After killing it with `pkill --full tracker-miner-fs-3 --echo`, I can
>> restart it with some debugging information using:
>> 
>> env TRACKER_DEBUG=config,miner-fs-events,monitors,statistics,status 
>> /gnu/store/[...]-tracker-miners-3.3.1/libexec/tracker-miner-fs-3
>> 
>> This seems to show some scheduling information about the indexing, but
>> not exactly what it's indexing.
>> 
>> Regards,
>> Ben
> 
> 
> I experienced a very similar situation.
> I hate hen it happens. Every time I move a file or I rename something 
> the thing starts to run and my cpu goes crazy.
> On the other hand, this is a recent problem, in previous versions it 
> didn't happen and I didn't really have more effort searching for files 
> in nautilus or similar applications. For me, it's just bad.
> 
> Also, I don't use GNOME directly, even if I have it installed and use 
> most of its apps, I run an i3 session, but tracker-miner is still 
> running.
> 
> I don't know if that helps.
> 
> If I could, I'd like to remove it.
> 
> Is it possible?
> 
> Thanks,
> Ekaitz

If I recall, Gnome Tracker uses Xapian as its backend.

I seem to have previously noticed alternative software which appears 
more performant (though I moved onto other activity so I cant confirm).

Is something like Redmine-Xapian a satisfactory alternative?
https://github.com/xelkano/redmine_xapian

Kind regards,

-- 
Jonathan McHugh
indieterminacy@libre.brussels

Re: Gnome Tracker (tracker-miner-fs-3) behaving badly

[Ben Sturmfels via]

indieterminacy <indieterminacy@libre.brussels> writes:

> If I recall, Gnome Tracker uses Xapian as its backend.
>
> I seem to have previously noticed alternative software which appears more
> performant (though I moved onto other activity so I cant confirm).
>
> Is something like Redmine-Xapian a satisfactory alternative?
> https://github.com/xelkano/redmine_xapian

Thanks Indieterminacy - I believe Redmine-Xapian is specifically for the
Redmine project management system, so may not be suitable substitute for
Tracker.

Regards,
Ben