General questions about tracker-miner

[Dan]

Yeesh! This flippin' critter is starting to look like, act like, and misbehave almost as much, as that nasty old dog, "Beagle" in FC6.

I've DLed the control GUI, and it allows a certain amount of control ... except the final solution to turn the damn thing off once and for all. Therefore, before I shoot this thing in the head with brute force -- like I eventually did it's ugly-dog ancestor -- I wonder:

• What good is it?
  
• Why is it?
  
• How deeply integrated (into F16/Gnome3) is it?
  
• Why does it need to chew away on the CPU (all four of 'em) for damn near thirty minutes on a fast machine with a 116g HDD (Running about 60% full -- mostly applications and photos.)?
  
• Is it really all that necessary?
  
• What will be the long-term consequences of killing it?
  
• What will be the short term consequences of killing it?
  
• Exactly how does one kill it ... without unacceptable collateral damage?

That should cover it for now. In the mean time ... where the devil did I park that icon for, "gnome-system-monitor -- kill this ugly stepchild!"?

Originally Posted by Dan

Yeesh! This flippin' critter is starting to look like, act like, and misbehave almost as much, as that nasty old dog, "Beagle" in FC6.

I've DLed the control GUI, and it allows a certain amount of control ... except the final solution to turn the damn thing off once and for all. Therefore, before I shoot this thing in the head with brute force -- like I eventually did it's ugly-dog ancestor -- I wonder:

• What good is it?
  
• Why is it?
  
• How deeply integrated (into F16/Gnome3) is it?
  
• Why does it need to chew away on the CPU (all four of 'em) for damn near thirty minutes on a fast machine with a 116g HDD (Running about 60% full -- mostly applications and photos.)?
  
• Is it really all that necessary?
  
• What will be the long-term consequences of killing it?
  
• What will be the short term consequences of killing it?
  
• Exactly how does one kill it ... without unacceptable collateral damage?

That should cover it for now. In the mean time ... where the devil did I park that icon for, "gnome-system-monitor -- kill this ugly stepchild!"?

To stop it dead try

gnome-session-properties

and un-check all the tracker related items.

[glennzo]

Dan, I can't intelligently answer any of your questions. I can, however, tell you that there was a post somewhere, likely here, about tweaking Fedora 17 for "speed". Amongst the tweaks mentioned was turning off all of that tracker stuff using gnome-session-properties. I turned them all off long (weeks or months) ago and have suffered no ill effects that I'm aware of.

Of course that's not to say that I think you should just blindly follow my lead. My Fedora systems are all disposable so if something breaks, for the most part I couldn't care less. I'll just reinstall.

+1 for turning that stuff off.

[secipolla]

The part for what is its use, I don't know.
As for (somewhat) gracefully keeping it (them) from starting, maybe copy its files from /etc/xdg/autostart to your ~/.config/autostart and add 'Hidden=true' (if it doesn't work, do it with the originals).
The best would be just remove it from the system. I think that could be made with the Xfce spin, IDK with the GNOME one.*
*repoquery says brasero, gnome-boxes and gnome-documents requires it.

Now, maybe, you'll find a use for it. But I think there are other 'semantic'(?) tools that do the same kind of job, like synapse (for this one I never read a complaint so maybe you could try it).

edit (more related ramblings)- when I had in this very old PC KDE 4.7.4 installed (Debian), I hade the nepomuk/strigi thing running and it behaved well enough ('nice' priority of 19 or something like that). When it got messed up with an upgrade it would misbehave badly but as soon as I reset (forcefully deleting files) its settings it behaved well again.
But I had few files and restricted a lot the scope of its searches.
So the KDE relative worked more'less well, but that was on 4.7.4. How well these tracker services are working I have no idea.

The only difference I notice by disabling it is abrt stopped complaining.

[Dan]

Thank you, gentlemen. Gnome-session-properties duly used to isolate and terminate ...


Now ... what -- exactly -- did I just kill? The blurb in that dialog says it "Crawls and processes files on the file system." I get the crawls part, and I get that it supposedly indexes. But WTH do they mean by, "processes"?

Once every three months or so, I buy a bunch of raw meat in bulk and "process" that. So, without a better meaning to attach ... I just can't see how a rogue chunk of code crawling the drive and turning my files into steaks, roasts, hamburger and sausage is anything I want going on/in my file system! <....>


<....>






<....>

[Yora0]

It's part of a system that creates a database of all the files on your computer and all devices and other computers that are connected to it. You can add information to any file, kind of like putting sticky notes on them, and then you can use the program to for example "list all files in the network that have been given the tag <Suprise Birthday Party>" and then it does that.

It's supposed to help you find files even when you are not sure if there are any such files, how many there would be, what their name would be, what file format they would have, and where they might be stored.
If you are working in a network with many users, this might actually not be such a bad idea. If one user creates or modifies a file that is somewhat relevant to "Suprise Birthday Party", you can have the program check once per day if anyone in the network did anything with files that have that tag. You don't have to ask all the time "Did anyone do something for the Birthday Party I should look at?" And what tracker does is going through all the files on your computer all the time to check if the database is still up to date or something was changed that needs to be added to the database.
Or if your computer is part of a company network or part of a research project or something like this. Could actually be quite useful.

For a normal user on a single computer, who names his own files and selects in what folders they go, it's completely useless and a waste of resources.
Tracker and anything like it should not be pre-installed. Very few people need it, and they should just manually install it. No need to dumb all the data and processing garbage on anyone who does not know that you manually have to disable it.
You might also look if you have something called Nepomuk on your system. It's basically the same thing but a different one. But might be installed only on KDE systems and not on Gnome.
Best way to get rid of it is to go into System Settings > Software Management and select everything called Tracker, Nepomuk, Beagle, or Soprano for deinstallation. Kill it. With fire! ^^

[Dan]

Neat. <....>

I vaguely wonder just exactly what it was crawling and indexing for 30~40 minutes. There was no drive activity on this machine to go along with all that CPU work.

Ah, well. It's dead now.

*Dan triggers the PA/Intercom.*

"WET CLEANUP ON ISLE FIVE! WET CLEANUP ON FIVE ... "

[secipolla]

Supposing it's like Yora0 said, then shouldn't folks that build Fedora do some proper software selection for the installation instead of just shipping whatever new things GNOME does (or are the GNOME people that choose)?
Ok, that's a bit hard but maybe not that far fetched.
Continuing the speculation, some useful system-config-xxx stuff (like the selinux configuration GUI) doesn't come pre-installed. Is it just because it hasn't been ported to GTK3?

I'm new to Fedora so I don't know how much it's like this really, just saying.

[DBelton]

There are a few tweaks you can do to tracker, but in my experience with it, totally disabling it has been the best option for me.

But, if you wish to play around with it and teak it, run dconf-editor, and go to the org.freedesktop.tracker key and expand it. There are numerous settings where you can tweak it.

The best setting I found was org.freedesktop.tracker.miner.files and set the crawling interval to -2 (completely disabled)

Edit:
This was in addition to killing all of the tracker stuff via gnome-session-properties

[Dan]

So ... what you're telling me is that I should have used Zombie Load Hollow Points®?

[BBQdave]

Originally Posted by Yora0

It's part of a system that creates a database of all the files on your computer and all devices and other computers that are connected to it. You can add information to any file, kind of like putting sticky notes on them, and then you can use the program to for example "list all files in the network that have been given the tag <Suprise Birthday Party>" and then it does that.

Thanks for the information Yora0.

Is this program also part of Fedora 16 Xfce?

[DBelton]

Originally Posted by Dan

So ... what you're telling me is that I should have used Zombie Load Hollow Points®?

Yep! Tracker is like a zombie.. You can shoot it and shoot it, but until you get the "head shot" it keeps coming back

In my opinion, Tracker is something that should be completely removed from Fedora and replaced with a better application (if you wish to have your drives indexed). There was someone just recently that did a comparison between Tracker and some other app (that had the same functionality) and found that Tracker was a real dog and big time system hog.

BBQDave, Tracker is a part of Gnome 3, it is included in F16, but if you are running just xfce, then it's not installed. However, I do seem to recall (but could be mistaken) that if you have Gnome 3 installed, then xfce will try and start it when it it starts as well unless you disable it.

[gadgetwiz]

I have all 3 tracker app disabled via gnome-session-properties but I caught it briefly running anyway, while viewing 'top'.

Perhaps disabling via gnome-session-properties keeps it from running at start up but something else is causing it to run at other times.

Is here any way to keep this tracker junk from running at all?

Can it be completely removed?