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I have the following lines repeating every minute in my /var/log/syslog file.

Oct  9 19:19:42 my_machine dbus-daemon[2138]: [session uid=1000 pid=2138] Activating via systemd: service name='org.freedesktop.Tracker1.Miner.Extract' unit='tracker-extract.service' requested by ':1.66' (uid=1000 pid=2555 comm="/usr/lib/tracker/tracker-miner-fs " label="unconfined")
Oct  9 19:19:42 my_machine systemd[2118]: Starting Tracker metadata extractor...
Oct  9 19:19:42 my_machine dbus-daemon[2138]: [session uid=1000 pid=2138] Successfully activated service 'org.freedesktop.Tracker1.Miner.Extract'
Oct  9 19:19:42 my_machine systemd[2118]: Started Tracker metadata extractor.
Oct  9 19:19:53 my_machine systemd[2118]: tracker-extract.service: Succeeded.

Can somebody explain what is going on.

My system is Ubuntu 19.04 with latest updates. This problem seems to have started around April 21st. Probably after upgrading 18.10 to 19.04.

How can I change the period from 1 minute to (say) 1 hour?

FedKad
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  • I've had this problem too and it obscures more important log messages. gsettings list-recursively | grep -i org.freedesktop.Tracker | sort | uniq shows log verbosity set to 'errors', and crawling-interval -2. I don't use GNOME but have a couple of tools installed I don't want to break by masking the service completely. – James EJ Jan 20 '21 at 20:37
  • GNOME Tracker indexes content from your home directory automatically, so applications can provide instant search results when you need them.. If verbosity is set to "errors" on dconf database you shouldn't see anything on journalctl. – Pablo Bianchi Jan 23 '21 at 01:10
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    @JamesEJ This was a problem that I had in version 19.04. Currently I am on version 20.10 and there are not so many messages. Although very irregular, I can say that around 10-15 messages per hour are logged into syslog. verbosity is set to errors, and org.freedesktop.Tracker.Miner.Files crawling-interval is -1. – FedKad Jan 23 '21 at 09:33
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    To me it looks like the messages you are seeing are not actually from tracker but from the system repeatedly starting tracker services. Unless that's how it's meant to work? I can't confirm as I disable tracker, personally I don't have any need for it and so far have not had any issues. If that's something you want to try then (optionally): tracker reset --hard followed by systemctl --user mask tracker-{miner-apps,miner-fs,store} seems to do the trick. – codlord Jan 24 '21 at 11:59
  • @codlord Yeah it looks like dbus-daemon is repeatedly starting the service, with lots of communication visible with dbus-monitor. – James EJ Jan 27 '21 at 03:50
  • tracker daemon -k stops the process and has options to pause through tracker help daemon – James EJ Jan 27 '21 at 03:51
  • @FedonKadifeli Interesting that it resolved with 20.10. From http://changelogs.ubuntu.com/changelogs/pool/main/t/tracker/tracker_2.3.6-2/changelog it looks like this disables autostart by not installing to /etc/xdg/autostart/tracker-*. Perhaps just tracker-store looking at https://gitlab.gnome.org/GNOME/tracker/-/merge_requests/309/diffs – James EJ Jan 27 '21 at 03:57
  • I'll tell you all one thing, since I removed tracker I have had almost no lockups (plagueing me for 2 years). I lost nautilus and I also lost the desktop and trying to reinstall nautilus gave dependency issues, so for now I will live with it. I had thought the last kernel update got rid of those lockups, it seemed to reduce them, but I was still getting several a day. Now only one lockup every few days. Resetting tracker might have fixed it, I dont know. Having tracker tied so much to nautilus reminds me of Windows coming with Internet Explorer once upon a time. – pierrely Feb 05 '21 at 05:46

3 Answers3

5

The modern way to disable Tracker is found here:

Run the following command to disable tracker for the current user:

systemctl --user mask tracker-store.service tracker-miner-fs.service tracker-miner-rss.service tracker-extract.service tracker-miner-apps.service tracker-writeback.service
tracker reset --hard
sudo reboot

Interestingly the question was quite popular in 2013:

The solution to disable it here is now outdated. Just pointing out the more things change the more they stay the same...

WinEunuuchs2Unix
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2

I detected the same thing on my system, too (based upon 20.04 LTS) but I am not too worried, but you should be if you see a performance degradation. This text indexing is meant to facilitate quick searches especially in these well-known areas:

    DOCUMENTS
    MUSIC
    PICTURES
    VIDEOS
    DOWNLOAD

You can get an idea of how much of your content is actively indexed. Here's mine.

    $ tracker status
    Currently indexed: 590 files, 37 folders
    Remaining space on database partition: 124.1 GB (49.63%)
    All data miners are idle, indexing complete

Maybe you have a lot more files being tracked than I do, but notice how it reports that I have used 50% of the space on this drive, yet only 590 files are indexed? It's because I don't have much stored in those well-publicized directories.

The thing is text indexes once created are really cheap and quick to maintain. They are actually a type of database with an inverted B-tree structure.

Making a quick scan to see if any text needs updating is really fast, so I wouldn't be alarmed about the 1 minute frequency unless you are noticing a slowdown.

If you're having a slowdown, or don't need all your MUSIC files scanned, try creating a directory maybe AUDIO and move the files there. The tracker should ease up and not keep so busy.

Here's another source to look at if you think that a tracker reset is the thing for you.

https://codeforlearning.com/understanding-about-tracker-miner-f-in-linux/

Good luck, mondotofu

mondotofu
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Type the following into your terminal.

tracker daemon --list-common-statuses --watch

Now open another terminal and touch hello and then nano into hello. Start typing in random data. save it and watch that daemon light up. Check out the links associated with the data.

Greenonline
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user1394564
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