What is /usr/lib/tracker/tracker-miner-fs ?
man tracker-miner-fs
tracker-miner-fs - Used to crawl the file system to mine data.
does anyone have a link as to what its sending back to the mothership ?
I have all ubuntu desktop search shut off
settings -> Search -> off
so why is this still running ?
Why do these system launched high resource hogs throw themselves in at boot up ? at a minimum they should know enough to lay low for several minutes after a boot up before trouncing a system
here is my top
top
top - 12:18:44 up 2 days, 22:05, 1 user, load average: 1.78, 0.93, 0.81
Tasks: 402 total, 2 running, 397 sleeping, 0 stopped, 3 zombie
%Cpu(s): 3.1 us, 0.8 sy, 12.3 ni, 81.4 id, 0.0 wa, 0.0 hi, 2.3 si, 0.0 st
MiB Mem : 11890.6 total, 2620.7 free, 6532.1 used, 2737.9 buff/cache
MiB Swap: 980.0 total, 520.4 free, 459.6 used. 4676.9 avail Mem
PID USER PR NI VIRT RES SHR S %CPU %MEM TIME+ COMMAND
2465 pie 39 19 907480 181896 5516 R 100.7 1.5 0:41.54 tracker-miner-f
27322 pie 20 0 2815908 300964 152648 S 16.3 2.5 0:05.06 Web Content
26063 pie 20 0 3446052 442824 213372 S 11.6 3.6 1:29.63 firefox-bin
2260 pie 20 0 3986768 495212 66044 S 1.7 4.1 180:56.22 gnome-shell
2591 pie 20 0 4982644 576408 60328 S 0.7 4.7 98:44.12 skypeforlinux
15989 pie 20 0 847760 255684 79192 S 0.7 2.1 76:30.11 opera-developer
10 root 20 0 0 0 0 I 0.3 0.0 3:16.04 rcu_sched
896 root -51 0 0 0 0 S 0.3 0.0 4:12.46 irq/129-iwlwifi
1156 systemd+ 20 0 23168 2976 1992 S 0.3 0.0 0:23.42 systemd-resolve
7691 pie 20 0 1857912 890064 102592 S 0.3 7.3 76:55.09 brave
15919 pie 20 0 609008 63460 40212 S 0.3 0.5 1:11.66 opera-developer
22668 pie 20 0 797876 206564 95392 S 0.3 1.7 1:01.99 brave
1 root 20 0 166808 6648 3776 S 0.0 0.1 0:42.56 systemd
here is the pid
ps -eafww|grep 2465
pie 2465 2131 0 Sep07 tty2 00:00:53 /usr/lib/tracker/tracker-miner-fs
here is its ubuntu package
apt-file search tracker-miner-fs
tracker-miner-fs
here is package description
apt show -a tracker-miner-fs
Description: metadata database, indexer and search tool - filesystem indexer
This package contains the tracker indexer for indexing your files and folders.
.
Tracker is an advanced framework for first class objects with associated
metadata and tags. It provides a one stop solution for all metadata, tags,
shared object databases, search tools and indexing.
Why is this system process using 100% of my CPU ?
How to purge it ... not the usual way as it appears to be deeply embedded and doing a simple package purge would destroy my box
sudo apt purge tracker-miner-fs
Reading package lists... Done
Building dependency tree
Reading state information... Done
The following packages were automatically installed and are no longer required:
apturl apturl-common libcue2 libgnome-autoar-0-0 libgsf-1-114 libgsf-1-common libtagc0 libtracker-control-2.0-0 libtracker-miner-2.0-0 nautilus-data tracker tracker-extract
Use 'sudo apt autoremove' to remove them.
The following packages will be REMOVED:
gnome-shell-extension-desktop-icons* nautilus* nautilus-share* tracker-miner-fs* ubuntu-desktop* ubuntu-desktop-minimal*
0 upgraded, 0 newly installed, 6 to remove and 0 not upgraded.
After this operation, 2,704 kB disk space will be freed.
Do you want to continue? [Y/n]
so lets not purge it ... how about just a remove
sudo apt remove tracker-miner-fs
Reading package lists... Done
Building dependency tree
Reading state information... Done
The following packages were automatically installed and are no longer required:
apturl apturl-common libcue2 libgnome-autoar-0-0 libgsf-1-114 libgsf-1-common libtagc0 libtracker-control-2.0-0 libtracker-miner-2.0-0 nautilus-data tracker tracker-extract
Use 'sudo apt autoremove' to remove them.
The following packages will be REMOVED:
gnome-shell-extension-desktop-icons nautilus nautilus-share tracker-miner-fs ubuntu-desktop ubuntu-desktop-minimal
0 upgraded, 0 newly installed, 6 to remove and 0 not upgraded.
After this operation, 2,704 kB disk space will be freed.
Do you want to continue? [Y/n]
so to remove it would also destroy the machine (if you remove a package which in turn wants to remove package ubuntu-desktop your machine will fail to boot normally so will require booting into recovery to get it up and running)
here is the contents of its ubuntu package
dpkg -L tracker-miner-fs
/.
/etc
/etc/xdg
/etc/xdg/autostart
/etc/xdg/autostart/tracker-miner-apps.desktop
/etc/xdg/autostart/tracker-miner-fs.desktop
/usr
/usr/lib
/usr/lib/sysctl.d
/usr/lib/sysctl.d/30-tracker.conf
/usr/lib/systemd
/usr/lib/systemd/user
/usr/lib/systemd/user/tracker-miner-apps.service
/usr/lib/systemd/user/tracker-miner-fs.service
/usr/lib/tracker
/usr/lib/tracker/tracker-miner-apps
/usr/lib/tracker/tracker-miner-fs
/usr/share
/usr/share/dbus-1
/usr/share/dbus-1/services
/usr/share/dbus-1/services/org.freedesktop.Tracker1.Miner.Applications.service
/usr/share/dbus-1/services/org.freedesktop.Tracker1.Miner.Files.service
/usr/share/doc
/usr/share/doc/tracker-miner-fs
/usr/share/doc/tracker-miner-fs/copyright
/usr/share/lintian
/usr/share/lintian/overrides
/usr/share/lintian/overrides/tracker-miner-fs
/usr/share/man
/usr/share/man/man1
/usr/share/man/man1/tracker-miner-fs.1.gz
/usr/share/tracker
/usr/share/tracker/miners
/usr/share/doc/tracker-miner-fs/changelog.Debian.gz
/usr/share/tracker/miners/org.freedesktop.Tracker1.Miner.Applications.service
/usr/share/tracker/miners/org.freedesktop.Tracker1.Miner.Files.service
Should I disable this by shutting off its systemd service ? Should it just be left alone ?
uname -m && uname -r && cat /etc/*release
x86_64
5.0.0-28-generic
DISTRIB_ID=Ubuntu
DISTRIB_RELEASE=19.04
DISTRIB_CODENAME=disco
DISTRIB_DESCRIPTION="Ubuntu 19.04"
NAME="Ubuntu"
VERSION="19.04 (Disco Dingo)"
I see its enabled using dconf-editor ->org->freedesktop->tracker->miner->files
What remains unanswered is who benefits from this running ? Can I also subscribe to the feed sent to the mothership to allow me to see who is using my packages/applications if that is what this tool is doing ? What is the big picture here ?
GNOME Tracker is a desktop search application. It does not send anything back to the "mothership", in fact it works entirely offline.
It sounds like you want to thoroughly disable GNOME Tracker without uninstalling it. Here's how to do that in an automated fashion.
Kill all current processes.
Stop the systemd services.
Turn off tracker-miner-fs via GNOME's
gsettings
:Here's the documentation on
crawling-interval
:Prevent tracker from autostarting.
Set
Hidden=true
in all of these desktop files:Here's how I script this:
If you don't have root privileges or don't want to alter system-level files, use these files instead:
Files with just these contents will do the trick:
Delete the tracker database.
This isn't actually necessary but will free up some hard drive space.
Related:
In my case, from time to time, I simply do
tracker reset --soft
and it works for many days.(I have not discovered yet what action causes the tracker to go crazy.)