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The file home/.cache/tracker/meta.db-wal fills my entire 250gb boot drive. If I delete document this file grows until there is no more space; its 52.2gb.

I have read some posts saying to disable the tracker with tracker reset. Or set it to pause when it reaches a certain size. Or purge the tracker to remove it permanently etc. Running tracker status I get:

Currently indexed: 35980 files, 5753 folders
Remaining space on database partition: 231.3 MB (0.09%)
(tracker status:32570): Tracker-CRITICAL **: 15:45:30.833: Could not get miner progress for 'org.freedesktop.Tracker1.Miner.Extract': Timeout was reached
Data is still being indexed: Estimated 02m 13s left

However I believe disabling/pausing the tracker means I cannot search files? I need search functionality so that isn't an option. And a 52gb file to allow searching seems broken.

The problem has been around for a while with an open confirmed bug report from 2012 and posts from 2014, 2019, and 2021 the only "solutions" involve disabling search functions. Any fresh insights?

Jason
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  • do you have many, many tiny files? – Esther Jun 27 '22 at 20:44
  • Yes, this computer is used for research the tests I run produce thousands of small files. And I need to be able to search those files. – Jason Jun 27 '22 at 21:02
  • indexing thousands of small files will take up a lot of space, but I can't tell if the amount of space it's taking is at all reasonable. – Esther Jun 27 '22 at 21:04
  • There are 115,300 files in my research directory currently, but they takes up significantly less space on the drive than the tracker file. The rest of my drive contains run of the mill documents. – Jason Jun 27 '22 at 21:09
  • if you need to search files, you can try to disable this system (which comes with Gnome) and use mlocate in the terminal instead. Its indexing system is apparently much better than the one messing with your system now. – Esther Jun 27 '22 at 21:30
  • https://askubuntu.com/questions/884297/how-much-cache-is-tracker-supposed-to-use – Esther Jun 27 '22 at 21:38
  • Both of those solutions I stated in my original post (pause tracker when it reaches a certain size or disable it). This has been listed as an official bug since 2012 meaning that it should not grow to giant sizes. – Jason Jun 27 '22 at 21:56

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