Category Archives: tracker

Tracker Thrashing at Gnome Boot

Use Gnome?  What is Tracker?  Well, here is the official description:

Tracker is a search engine, search tool and metadata storage system.

It allows you to find the proverbial needle in your computer’s haystack as well as providing a one stop solution to the organisation, storage and categorisation of your data.

Source:  Tracker Wiki

I would add that Tracker kills my system at boot.  Maybe not kill, but brings it to a crawl.  I have thought about disabling it, but sometimes I like the Gnome desktop search.  My fix for the boot issue:

/etc/xdg/autostart
 
littleturd autostart # ls -l tracker*
-rw-r--r-- 1 root root 524 Dec 30 21:33 tracker-extract.desktop
-rw-r--r-- 1 root root 532 Dec 30 21:43 tracker-miner-fs.desktop
-rw-r--r-- 1 root root 597 Dec 30 21:44 tracker-store.desktop

Now change the following in each of the above files:

X-GNOME-Autostart-enabled=false

Of course, resetting things helped too.

/etc/xdg/autostart
tracker-control -r   :Kill all Tracker processes and remove all databases
tracker-control -s   :Starts miners (which indirectly starts tracker-store too)

Last, don’t be dumb like me who mounts his NAS in his home directory, know what directories tracker is set to scan!