tracker-miner-fs is taking 90% of CPU

Question

tracker-miner-fs is taking 90% of CPU. I am using Ubuntu 20.04.

Answer 1

Have some patience. It eventually will go over.

Tracker is an indexing system. It searches all files for words, which are included in a database so you can quickly find files containing specific words.

The first time, tracker needs to index all files. On subsequent times, only changed and new files are also included in the index. It is typical for Tracker to require some minutes of high processor activity to check the file system for changed files and update the index.

‣ If, despite your patience, tracker keeps using high cpu, then there may be an issue with the database. In that case, clearing the database and having tracker reconstruct it may help:

tracker reset --hard ; tracker daemon --start

Beware, all files need reindexing, so there will be some processor useage for a while.

‣ It may be that you have a folder with frequently changing content, e.g. a Downloads folder. You can selectively disabling tracking a folder by placing a hidden file .trackerignore in the folder, or disable searching the folder in the Settings - Search dialog (button "Search locations:" in Ubuntu 20.04, gear wheel in older versions).

‣ If Tracker overall annoys you, you can disable it completely. File name based search in nautilus will still work (and be quite a bit faster).

Answer 2

Tracker (and miner) has plenty of configuration options accessible via dconf-editor under /org/freedesktop/tracker/.

Specifically to make miner less CPU aggressive org.freedesktop.Tracker.Miner.Files throttle value can be set to anything between 0 and 20, the higher the slower.

Also, setting org.freedesktop.Tracker.Extract wait-for-miner-fs to true should prevent running tracker-miner-fs and tracker-extract in parallel.

Answer 3

Run the following commands in a shell:

echo -e "\nHidden=true\n" | sudo tee --append /etc/xdg/autostart/tracker-extract.desktop /etc/xdg/autostart/tracker-miner-apps.desktop /etc/xdg/autostart/tracker-miner-fs.desktop /etc/xdg/autostart/tracker-miner-user-guides.desktop /etc/xdg/autostart/tracker-store.desktop > /dev/null
Interval in days to check whether the filesystem is up to date in the database. 0 forces crawling anytime, -1 forces it only after unclean shutdowns, and -2 disables it entirely. Default: -1
gsettings set org.freedesktop.Tracker.Miner.Files crawling-interval -2
Set to false to completely disable any file monitoring. Default: true
gsettings set org.freedesktop.Tracker.Miner.Files enable-monitors false
tracker reset --hard # Remove tracker database

Related

• Similar answer: CPU load - tracker-store and tracker-miner-fs eating up my CPU on every startup
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• FAQ - Tracker: How can I control what Tracker indexes?