Re: Gnome Tracker (tracker-miner-fs-3) behaving badly

[indieterminacy]

On 18-08-2022 11:08, Ekaitz Zarraga wrote:
> Hi,
>
>
> ------- Original Message -------
> On Thursday, August 18th, 2022 at 2:50 AM, Ben Sturmfels via 
> <help-guix@gnu.org> wrote:
>
>
> > Hi Folks!
> >
> > I really like the idea of Gnome Tracker - index all your files,
> > contacts, etc. so you can quickly search them. It just doesn't seem to
> > work properly, it uses a lot of resources and it's behaviour is
> > opaque. I'm not sure whether this is the configuration in Guix System,
> > or whether Tracker just isn't well designed. My hunch is that it's a
> > design problem. Does anyone have good/bad experience with Tracker
> > outside of Guix?
> >
> > Specific issues:
> >
> > * the tracker-miner-fs-3 process runs spontaneously consuming at least
> > one CPU for a few minutes (I haven't kept track of how long or how
> > often)
> >
> > * after all this scanning, searching in Gnome Activities doesn't
> > display any matches for the contents of files, only the filenames -
> > I thought indexing the contents was the whole point
> >
> > * when it's busy, tracker-miner-fs-3 seems to ignore `kill` (SIGTERM)
> > and needs `kill -9` (SIGKILL) to kill it
> >
> > * it's not clear exactly what files Tracker is indexing - there 
> > doesn't
> > appear to be a log - I'd really like to be able to just `tail -f` to
> > see what's going on
> >
> > I'd like to also understand how tracker-miner-fs-3 is started by
> > Gnome. It seems to start automatically and restart after some time if
> > killed. It doesn't seem to be listed under "Startup Applications" in
> > Gnome Tweak Tool.
> >
> > Debugging Tracker:
> >
> > After killing it with `pkill --full tracker-miner-fs-3 --echo`, I can
> > restart it with some debugging information using:
> >
> > env TRACKER_DEBUG=config,miner-fs-events,monitors,statistics,status 
> > /gnu/store/[...]-tracker-miners-3.3.1/libexec/tracker-miner-fs-3
> >
> > This seems to show some scheduling information about the indexing, but
> > not exactly what it's indexing.
> >
> > Regards,
> > Ben
>
>
> I experienced a very similar situation.
> I hate hen it happens. Every time I move a file or I rename something 
> the thing starts to run and my cpu goes crazy.
> On the other hand, this is a recent problem, in previous versions it 
> didn't happen and I didn't really have more effort searching for files 
> in nautilus or similar applications. For me, it's just bad.
>
> Also, I don't use GNOME directly, even if I have it installed and use 
> most of its apps, I run an i3 session, but tracker-miner is still 
> running.
>
> I don't know if that helps.
>
> If I could, I'd like to remove it.
>
> Is it possible?
>
> Thanks,
> Ekaitz

If I recall, Gnome Tracker uses Xapian as its backend.

I seem to have previously noticed alternative software which appears 
more performant (though I moved onto other activity so I cant confirm).

Is something like Redmine-Xapian a satisfactory alternative?
https://github.com/xelkano/redmine_xapian

Kind regards,

--
Jonathan McHugh
indieterminacy@libre.brussels