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

[Ekaitz Zarraga <ekaitz@elenq.tech>]

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