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I recently upgraded to 16.04 from 14.04. Somehow, this is the first time I've ever even noticed tracker, though it seems complaints have been forthcoming for years now.

Ever since the upgrade, a process called tracker-miner-fs is constantly eating CPU.

At this moment, from top : 

top - 16:49:45 up 1 day,  3:20,  4 users,  load average: 1.28, 1.85, 2.27
Tasks: 288 total,   2 running, 285 sleeping,   0 stopped,   1 zombie
%Cpu(s):  2.3 us,  8.6 sy, 23.5 ni, 65.6 id,  0.0 wa,  0.0 hi,  0.0 si,  0.0 st
KiB Mem :  3737272 total,   179160 free,  2017372 used,  1540740 buff/cache
KiB Swap:  9764860 total,  8125228 free,  1639632 used.  1148728 avail Mem 

  PID USER      PR  NI    VIRT    RES    SHR S  %CPU %MEM     TIME+ COMMAND                 
 7189 chintal   39  19  566244   9596   3884 R 104.9  0.3   1004:52 tracker-miner-f         
 8764 chintal   20   0 2387948 986.3m  68600 S   4.6 27.0 370:59.00 firefox

However, tracker itself claims it's not doing anything.

$ tracker status
Currently indexed: 4119 files, 135 folders
Remaining space on database partition: 111.4 GB (56.61%)
All data miners are idle, indexing complete

This CPU usage is more or less constant. System performance has been horrible, with persistently high load averages. This is, by the way, on an Intel i7.

This is also exacerbating an overheating issue which I began to see over the last three weeks of my use of 14.04 (Seen only on Ubuntu, not on Windows, and after over a year of constant and regular use had no issues), and the reason for my upgrade. 

$ sensors
acpitz-virtual-0
Adapter: Virtual device
temp1:        +85.0°C  (crit = +108.0°C)

coretemp-isa-0000
Adapter: ISA adapter
Physical id 0:  +86.0°C  (high = +87.0°C, crit = +105.0°C)
Core 0:         +82.0°C  (high = +87.0°C, crit = +105.0°C)
Core 1:         +82.0°C  (high = +87.0°C, crit = +105.0°C)

asus-isa-0000
Adapter: ISA adapter
cpu_fan:     25500 RPM
temp1:        +85.0°C
Rinzwind
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Chintalagiri Shashank
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  • a CPU is there to be used. Not using it is a waste of available resources. 2. tracker is the file indexing service to quickly get you search results when searching through the desktop. - rant removed. And see this please http://askubuntu.com/questions/346211/tracker-store-and-tracker-miner-fs-eating-up-my-cpu-on-every-startup and pay attention to this answer: http://askubuntu.com/a/353450/15811
    • – Rinzwind Jul 23 '16 at 11:32
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    @Rinzwind : There is a very noticeable drop in responsiveness and rise in temperature when tracker is enabled vs disable (I checked). The resources it's using are not just idle CPU cycles. Further, tracker status should be able to report what it's doing with the CPU. If it's miners are all idle, why do I have multiple tracker-miner processes in permanent residence at the top of htop output, with atleast one of them above my own processes that have CPU requirements? – Chintalagiri Shashank Jul 23 '16 at 11:37
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    @Rinzwind: Waking up a CPU to execute instructions on it consumes more power than letting it sleep. – David Foerster Jul 23 '16 at 15:26