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What is /usr/lib/tracker/tracker-miner-fs ?

man tracker-miner-fs

tracker-miner-fs - Used to crawl the file system to mine data.

does anyone have a link as to what its sending back to the mothership ?

I have all ubuntu desktop search shut off

settings -> Search -> off

so why is this still running ?

Why do these system launched high resource hogs throw themselves in at boot up ? at a minimum they should know enough to lay low for several minutes after a boot up before trouncing a system

here is my top

 top

top - 12:18:44 up 2 days, 22:05,  1 user,  load average: 1.78, 0.93, 0.81
Tasks: 402 total,   2 running, 397 sleeping,   0 stopped,   3 zombie
%Cpu(s):  3.1 us,  0.8 sy, 12.3 ni, 81.4 id,  0.0 wa,  0.0 hi,  2.3 si,  0.0 st
MiB Mem :  11890.6 total,   2620.7 free,   6532.1 used,   2737.9 buff/cache
MiB Swap:    980.0 total,    520.4 free,    459.6 used.   4676.9 avail Mem 

  PID USER      PR  NI    VIRT    RES    SHR S  %CPU  %MEM     TIME+ COMMAND                                                                                                      
 2465 pie       39  19  907480 181896   5516 R 100.7   1.5   0:41.54 tracker-miner-f                                                                                              
27322 pie       20   0 2815908 300964 152648 S  16.3   2.5   0:05.06 Web Content                                                                                                  
26063 pie       20   0 3446052 442824 213372 S  11.6   3.6   1:29.63 firefox-bin                                                                                                  
 2260 pie       20   0 3986768 495212  66044 S   1.7   4.1 180:56.22 gnome-shell                                                                                                  
 2591 pie       20   0 4982644 576408  60328 S   0.7   4.7  98:44.12 skypeforlinux                                                                                                
15989 pie       20   0  847760 255684  79192 S   0.7   2.1  76:30.11 opera-developer                                                                                              
   10 root      20   0       0      0      0 I   0.3   0.0   3:16.04 rcu_sched                                                                                                    
  896 root     -51   0       0      0      0 S   0.3   0.0   4:12.46 irq/129-iwlwifi                                                                                              
 1156 systemd+  20   0   23168   2976   1992 S   0.3   0.0   0:23.42 systemd-resolve                                                                                              
 7691 pie       20   0 1857912 890064 102592 S   0.3   7.3  76:55.09 brave                                                                                                        
15919 pie       20   0  609008  63460  40212 S   0.3   0.5   1:11.66 opera-developer                                                                                              
22668 pie       20   0  797876 206564  95392 S   0.3   1.7   1:01.99 brave                                                                                                        
    1 root      20   0  166808   6648   3776 S   0.0   0.1   0:42.56 systemd

here is the pid

ps -eafww|grep 2465 
pie       2465  2131  0 Sep07 tty2     00:00:53 /usr/lib/tracker/tracker-miner-fs

here is its ubuntu package

apt-file search tracker-miner-fs

tracker-miner-fs

here is package description

apt show  -a   tracker-miner-fs


Description: metadata database, indexer and search tool - filesystem indexer
 This package contains the tracker indexer for indexing your files and folders.
 .
 Tracker is an advanced framework for first class objects with associated
 metadata and tags. It provides a one stop solution for all metadata, tags,
 shared object databases, search tools and indexing.

Why is this system process using 100% of my CPU ?

How to purge it ... not the usual way as it appears to be deeply embedded and doing a simple package purge would destroy my box

 sudo apt purge  tracker-miner-fs 
Reading package lists... Done
Building dependency tree       
Reading state information... Done
The following packages were automatically installed and are no longer required:
  apturl apturl-common libcue2 libgnome-autoar-0-0 libgsf-1-114 libgsf-1-common libtagc0 libtracker-control-2.0-0 libtracker-miner-2.0-0 nautilus-data tracker tracker-extract
Use 'sudo apt autoremove' to remove them.
The following packages will be REMOVED:
  gnome-shell-extension-desktop-icons* nautilus* nautilus-share* tracker-miner-fs* ubuntu-desktop* ubuntu-desktop-minimal*
0 upgraded, 0 newly installed, 6 to remove and 0 not upgraded.
After this operation, 2,704 kB disk space will be freed.
Do you want to continue? [Y/n]

so lets not purge it ... how about just a remove

sudo apt remove tracker-miner-fs 
Reading package lists... Done
Building dependency tree       
Reading state information... Done
The following packages were automatically installed and are no longer required:
  apturl apturl-common libcue2 libgnome-autoar-0-0 libgsf-1-114 libgsf-1-common libtagc0 libtracker-control-2.0-0 libtracker-miner-2.0-0 nautilus-data tracker tracker-extract
Use 'sudo apt autoremove' to remove them.
The following packages will be REMOVED:
  gnome-shell-extension-desktop-icons nautilus nautilus-share tracker-miner-fs ubuntu-desktop ubuntu-desktop-minimal
0 upgraded, 0 newly installed, 6 to remove and 0 not upgraded.
After this operation, 2,704 kB disk space will be freed.
Do you want to continue? [Y/n]

so to remove it would also destroy the machine (if you remove a package which in turn wants to remove package ubuntu-desktop your machine will fail to boot normally so will require booting into recovery to get it up and running)

here is the contents of its ubuntu package

dpkg -L tracker-miner-fs 
/.
/etc
/etc/xdg
/etc/xdg/autostart
/etc/xdg/autostart/tracker-miner-apps.desktop
/etc/xdg/autostart/tracker-miner-fs.desktop
/usr
/usr/lib
/usr/lib/sysctl.d
/usr/lib/sysctl.d/30-tracker.conf
/usr/lib/systemd
/usr/lib/systemd/user
/usr/lib/systemd/user/tracker-miner-apps.service
/usr/lib/systemd/user/tracker-miner-fs.service
/usr/lib/tracker
/usr/lib/tracker/tracker-miner-apps
/usr/lib/tracker/tracker-miner-fs
/usr/share
/usr/share/dbus-1
/usr/share/dbus-1/services
/usr/share/dbus-1/services/org.freedesktop.Tracker1.Miner.Applications.service
/usr/share/dbus-1/services/org.freedesktop.Tracker1.Miner.Files.service
/usr/share/doc
/usr/share/doc/tracker-miner-fs
/usr/share/doc/tracker-miner-fs/copyright
/usr/share/lintian
/usr/share/lintian/overrides
/usr/share/lintian/overrides/tracker-miner-fs
/usr/share/man
/usr/share/man/man1
/usr/share/man/man1/tracker-miner-fs.1.gz
/usr/share/tracker
/usr/share/tracker/miners
/usr/share/doc/tracker-miner-fs/changelog.Debian.gz
/usr/share/tracker/miners/org.freedesktop.Tracker1.Miner.Applications.service
/usr/share/tracker/miners/org.freedesktop.Tracker1.Miner.Files.service

Should I disable this by shutting off its systemd service ? Should it just be left alone ? 

uname -m && uname -r && cat /etc/*release
x86_64
5.0.0-28-generic
DISTRIB_ID=Ubuntu
DISTRIB_RELEASE=19.04
DISTRIB_CODENAME=disco
DISTRIB_DESCRIPTION="Ubuntu 19.04"
NAME="Ubuntu"
VERSION="19.04 (Disco Dingo)"

I see its enabled using dconf-editor ->org->freedesktop->tracker->miner->files

I see its enabled using dconf-editor ->org->freedesktop->tracker->miner->files

What remains unanswered is who benefits from this running ? Can I also subscribe to the feed sent to the mothership to allow me to see who is using my packages/applications if that is what this tool is doing ? What is the big picture here ?

Scott Stensland
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    Possible duplicate of tracker-store and tracker-miner-fs eating up my CPU on every startup – Nmath Sep 10 '19 at 16:44
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    Woah, why would you start by purging? Try apt get remove first. Also, is there an actual problem here? It's running with a very low priority and a very high nice value, that shouldn't cause you any issues at all. Is it? – terdon Sep 10 '19 at 16:47
  • For 'who benefits?' - you benfit. See the package description. It's sending nothing 'back to the mothership'. That's not it's purpose. – user535733 Sep 10 '19 at 18:48
  • Re. "What is the big picture here ?", GNOME developers may be in the best position to answer you since they developed it. – DK Bose Sep 11 '19 at 04:05
  • I came across a comment indicating that a corrupt file could cause the process to go wonky: This pointed to this. Something similar can happen with other indexers as well. – DK Bose Sep 11 '19 at 04:09
  • I ran into this problem on Arch now as I checked top due to another misbehaving app (laptop fan was quite working). I followed https://www.linuxuprising.com/2019/07/how-to-completely-disable-tracker.html (yes, it was posted after this post), and executed the 'systemctl --user mask tracker-store.service tracker-miner-fs.service tracker-miner-rss.service tracker-extract.service tracker-miner-apps.service tracker-writeback.service' and 'tracker reset --hard' commands there. I do not see why I would need to reboot. Well, I am not even using Gnome now, just happened to install some DEs over time :) – Attila123 Oct 19 '20 at 09:02

2 Answers2

5

does anyone have a link as to what its sending back to the mothership?

GNOME Tracker is a desktop search application. It does not send anything back to the "mothership", in fact it works entirely offline.

It sounds like you want to thoroughly disable GNOME Tracker without uninstalling it. Here's how to do that in an automated fashion.

  1. Kill all current processes.

    killall tracker

  2. Stop the systemd services.

    systemctl --user stop tracker-{miner-apps,miner-fs,store}
systemctl --user mask tracker-{miner-apps,miner-fs,store}
systemctl --user stop tracker-{miner-fs,miner-rss,writeback,xdg-portal,miner-fs-control}-3.service
systemctl --user mask tracker-{miner-fs,miner-rss,writeback,xdg-portal,miner-fs-control}-3.service

  3. Turn off tracker-miner-fs via GNOME's gsettings:

    gsettings set org.freedesktop.Tracker.Miner.Files crawling-interval -2
gsettings set org.freedesktop.Tracker.Miner.Files enable-monitors false

    Here's the documentation on crawling-interval:

    Interval in days to check whether the filesystem is up to date in the database. 0 forces crawling anytime, -1 forces it only after unclean shutdowns, and -2 disables it entirely.

  4. Prevent tracker from autostarting.

    Set Hidden=true in all of these desktop files:

    • /etc/xdg/autostart/tracker-extract.desktop
    • /etc/xdg/autostart/tracker-miner-apps.desktop
    • /etc/xdg/autostart/tracker-miner-fs.desktop
    • /etc/xdg/autostart/tracker-miner-user-guides.desktop
    • /etc/xdg/autostart/tracker-store.desktop

    Here's how I script this:

    for f in /etc/xdg/autostart/tracker-extract.desktop \
    /etc/xdg/autostart/tracker-miner-apps.desktop \
    /etc/xdg/autostart/tracker-miner-fs.desktop \
    /etc/xdg/autostart/tracker-miner-user-guides.desktop \
    /etc/xdg/autostart/tracker-store.desktop
do
    if grep '^Hidden=true$' "$f" > /dev/null
    then
        : # do nothing
    elif grep '^Hidden=' "$f" > /dev/null
    then
        sudo sed -i -e 's;Hidden=.*;Hidden=true;' "$f"
    else
        printf "\nHidden=true\n" | sudo tee --append "$f"
    fi
done

    If you don't have root privileges or don't want to alter system-level files, use these files instead:

    • ~/.config/autostart/tracker-extract.desktop
    • ~/.config/autostart/tracker-miner-apps.desktop
    • ~/.config/autostart/tracker-miner-fs.desktop
    • ~/.config/autostart/tracker-miner-user-guides.desktop
    • ~/.config/autostart/tracker-store.desktop

    Files with just these contents will do the trick:

    [Desktop Entry]
Hidden=true

  5. Delete the tracker database.

    tracker reset --hard
tracker3 reset -s -r

    This isn't actually necessary but will free up some hard drive space.

Related:

Nathaniel M. Beaver
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  • That's a lot of effort to go to, I'd try simply removing the package first, eg sudo apt remove tracker* (make sure you're only removing packages you want to remove!). – pbhj Jul 05 '22 at 16:06
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    @pbhj As the question demonstrates, tracker is a dependency of gnome-core, so you can't apt remove tracker-miner-fs without removing ubuntu-desktop. This is by design: tracker is a GNOME Core Application. – Nathaniel M. Beaver Jul 07 '22 at 12:37
  • Ubuntu-desktop is a metapackage, a virtual package, so it doesn't remove actual packages to remove it. Your link is from 2014, the Ubuntu-desktop packages in 18.04, and 20.04 don't have tracker as a dependency. You can solve it by making a dummy package and installing that, then pinning it (see "hold" for apt-mark); that also is a lot of faff. Another way is to remove the binary, touch the file name, then set it read-only; not great for forward maintenance. – pbhj Jul 08 '22 at 08:03
2

In my case, from time to time, I simply do tracker reset --soft and it works for many days.

(I have not discovered yet what action causes the tracker to go crazy.)

EmmaRenauld
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