Tracker-extract and Tracker-store processes consuming huge Amount of RAM

Question

I am using Arch Linux, kernel 3.16.

From last one week my two processes tracker-extract and tracker-store are taking too much RAM. It results in hangup of system once in every 2 hours.

tracker-extract taking 300 MB and tracker -store taking 2 GB RAM.(total RAM is 3.8 GB)

I want to know what are these tracker processes and what are their work. If i kill them does this effect in system performance ?

What are the ways to kill them permanently so that I can get rid of these two processes?

Please help me.

Why the ubuntu tag if this is Arch Linux? – Alexx Roche Sep 18 '18 at 17:22 — Alexx Roche, Sep 18 '18 at 17:22
also CPU usage make fun turn on – Daniel Benedykt Jan 27 '21 at 01:37 — Daniel Benedykt, Jan 27 '21 at 01:37

score 26 · Answer 1 · answered Aug 02 '18 at 03:59

26

Tracker is used (by gnome) to index files to make them searchable and appear automatically in some programs (like Rhythmbox for music files, etc). More info from the Ubuntu wiki on it here https://wiki.ubuntu.com/Tracker.

You can do a hard reset of the tags database and restart all the tracker processes with this command:

tracker reset -r

answered Aug 02 '18 at 03:59

jket

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This helped me when I had to restore some backups that probably had an old tracker db image. – Luciano Oct 05 '19 at 16:12

score 11 · Answer 2 · answered Nov 05 '14 at 05:03

11

Use pkgfile to work out what package these files belong to:

pkgfile tracker-extract

Results:

extra/tracker

A quick package search using pacman (pacman -Ss tracker), reveals:

extra/tracker 1.2.3-1 (gnome)
    All-in-one indexer, search tool and metadata database

Since I am not a user of gnome, I cannot comment on the specific functionality that this package provides. But you could always try removing the package and see what happens:

pacman -Rs tracker

answered Nov 05 '14 at 05:03

Steve

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`gnome-music` and `gnome-documents` both depend on tracker, if you don't use those then I suppose you don't really need it – sinisterstuf Nov 10 '14 at 10:43
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Nice answer. I found this tracker-extract holding files open on nfs disk causing un-removable .nfs000000... files (until that process was killed off). https://unix.stackexchange.com/questions/231074/removed-a-vagrant-file-and-now-i-see-nfs0000000000b869e300000001/537840#537840 – gaoithe Aug 28 '19 at 10:08

score 8 · Answer 3 · answered Jul 17 '15 at 05:41

8

tracker is used to index your documents.

Here is a procedure to disable the indexing on Fedora

answered Jul 17 '15 at 05:41

Denis Rouzaud

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Note that [link-only answers](http://meta.stackoverflow.com/tags/link-only-answers/info) are discouraged, SO answers should be the end-point of a search for a solution (vs. yet another stopover of references, which tend to get stale over time). Please consider adding a stand-alone synopsis here, keeping the link as a reference – kleopatra Jul 17 '15 at 08:12
This exact procedure (follow the link above) worked on my CentOS 7.6. – My Name Oct 18 '19 at 15:47
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@kleopatra I agree. The answers could be here and author can comment the link as source. The above link is invalid and the answer is useful for nothing. – SKPS Sep 10 '22 at 05:35
I was interested in how to disable the tracker processes but the link no longer works. I flagged this for deletion since it offers no useful information and wasted my time on a link that no longer exists. – PatS Feb 14 '23 at 16:49

score 8 · Answer 4 · edited Sep 18 '18 at 19:21

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Use tracker daemon -t to terminate and tracker daemon -s to start the processes.

edited Sep 18 '18 at 19:21

Alexx Roche

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answered Sep 18 '18 at 15:14

score 2 · Answer 5 · answered Apr 10 '19 at 16:08

AskUbuntu has a bunch of conversation about issues with Tracker. Apparently some people see it eating up CPU or disk space instead, but I had the same problem as you with unreasonable RAM consumption—after leaving it overnight I came back to find it using 5.9GB!

This answer offers commands for Ubuntu that look like they should also work on Arch Linux:

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
gsettings set org.freedesktop.Tracker.Miner.Files crawling-interval -2  
gsettings set org.freedesktop.Tracker.Miner.Files enable-monitors false  
tracker reset --hard

I took the simpler route of trying to uninstall tracker-store and tracker-miners. It had been installed as the dependency of a couple programs that weren't important to me, so I uninstalled them as well. Problem solved!

score 2 · Answer 6 · answered Aug 15 '21 at 11:41

It is used for indexing purposes in ubuntu I disabled it in Ubuntu 20.04.2 LTS, much faster now

tracker daemon -t
cd ~/.config/autostart
cp -v /etc/xdg/autostart/tracker-*.desktop ./
for FILE in tracker-*.desktop; do echo Hidden=true >> $FILE; done
rm -rf ~/.cache/tracker ~/.local/share/tracker

check the status,

tracker status

Tracker-extract and Tracker-store processes consuming huge Amount of RAM

6 Answers6