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I tried downloading three pdfs via google drive through firefox.
All of a sudden, my laptop - lenovo ideapad 330s heated up while the pdfs havent finished downloading at all.
I downloaded htop to see what was happening.
All I saw that was suspicious was libexec tracker-miner-fs and lib-exec-document-portal running as user - me. I didn't get any idea... finally decided to close firefox without waiting for the download to complete as they are taking such a long time for a 20 mb file. I saw that all three were partially downloaded missing a few hundred pages.
I deleted the partially downloaded file via the GUI by clicking the delete button.
The laptop was still overheated.
I looked up at top and saw that I was running a Priv cont process.
As I understand, It is used to run processes as higher Privileged? I kill the process with its PID and reboot the laptop.
I don't know If I am paranoid or something. Can someone make any sense out of this? after the reboot, the heating subsided.

I also looked at the auth.log located at ~/var/log/auth.log - its output

I cant help but notice that pam_unix is trying to access /etc/securetty which is a really badly named dir. The dir didnt exist in my local storage and thus returned an error as seen in the log.

The pdfs had an average size of 20 mb and the average number of pages were 500.

Or is it a bug with firefox? As I understand through other posts, the print in firefox isnt working well. and I used the print to pdf in firefox to download my files.

It is Ubuntu 20.04 - Focal fossa.

Blank
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  • securetty is correctly named - secure and tty concatenated and I have no problems printing from FF in v20.04 – graham Apr 25 '21 at 16:47
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    There's almost no information in your rant. Is this on Ubuntu? Which release? How is it connected? What's your MTU? – waltinator Apr 25 '21 at 16:49
  • @waltinator thanks for pointing that out. I edited the post. – Blank Apr 25 '21 at 16:52
  • @24601 thanks for the comment. So, pam_unix is cleared then. mustve been a bug with firefox? And my MTU is 1492 - taken from link – Blank Apr 25 '21 at 16:53
  • It could have been a Firefox bug. It could have been a Tracker bug. It could have been a networking problem. It could have been a cosmic ray. It could have been a lot of things. Voting to close - you don't seem to have any way for a Bug Triager or Developer to reliably reproduce the issue so they can trace down the actual cause. If you do discover a way to reliably reproduce the behavior, please file a bug report. The developers would love to fix it. – user535733 Apr 25 '21 at 17:11
  • I have seen some people complaining about tracker-miner-fs eating up all their processor resources. Maybe the filesystem change with the progressing download sent tracker miner fs crazy. Which I would readily believe, since it already has a very unfortunately chosen name, doesn't it. – Levente Apr 25 '21 at 17:55
  • Additionally, while I don't remember experiencing anything specific around downloading pdfs with Firefox, I indeed experienced some interesting activities kicking in right while interacting with Firefox (and usually never with any other program). I have seen jbd2 to go full gung-ho on my disk a few times while Firefoxing, and also some onslaught of apparmor audits with profile_replace operation... I don't know what these mean because I'm an amateur. – Levente Apr 25 '21 at 18:05
  • @user535733 Yes I don't seem to have any way to triage the bug because as you can see above, I am an amateur. Maybe its the cosmic rays. Cause I don't think of anything else that could push my laptop into a deadlock just for downloading 20 mb pdf files. I have accepted an answer. Thanks for your contribution. – Blank Apr 26 '21 at 18:30

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That tracker-miner-fs is a background process that indexes documents on the off-chance that you might want to use a full text search on them some day.

I personally resent the very thought of that, and I believe that Linux desktop development has taken a wrong turn when they introduced that kind of thing: When I want to do a full text search in a lot of documents, I am prepared to wait for a moment, even a minute or two. But I am not prepared to let my system get bogged down every time I handle documents, such as you did: Downloading a lot of them.

I try my best to keep my system clean of such software, but that is getting increasingly harder as pretty much all desktops come with something like that preinstalled, and it's not that easy to get rid of them.

See also here:

HuHa
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  • Do you know how can I even access, or rather, benefit from the index gained this way? If I search in Nautilus, it will show only matches in directory- and file names, but not in their content... – Levente Apr 25 '21 at 17:57
  • I am accepting this as an answer cuz I don't think its anything else. I have a simple ubuntu desktop environement - clutter less. Nothing running in the background except maybe pre-loader daemon that I installed manually. – Blank Apr 26 '21 at 18:28