Blog

How to disable tracker-store processes that eat 100% CPU

lunux
2 Min Read
0

I use KDE almost always, but on my main laptop I always install GNOME in the Opensuse installation, just in case I want to take it for a spin. Unfortunately this seems to have also installed something called ‚tracker‘ that is meant to be a desktop indexing and search service for GNOME. Even when I login to KDE this tracker thing starts up and spends ages eating 100% CPU time of one of the laptop’s cores, not to mention thrashing the disk.

Luckily the fix is simple:
Edit /etc/xdg/autostart and add the following line to the tracker-*.desktop files:
Hidden=true
See https://wiki.ubuntu.com/Tracker

After that the tracker-store etc. processes will no longer start up when you login, you’ll need to logout and log back in for the change to take affect of course.

Maybe one day one of these Linux desktop search things will work without killing the performance of the machine it runs on and thereby destroying the user experience it’s supposed to enhance.

 

Tracker is a synergy of technologies that are designed to provide a highly sophisticated, innovative and integrated desktop.

Tracker provides the following:

  • Indexer for desktop search (for more details see this spec : https://wiki.ubuntu.com/IntegratedDesktopSearch)
  • Tag database for doing keyword tagging of any object
  • Extensible metadata database for apps like gedit and rhythmbox which need to add custom metadata to files
  • Database for first class objects allows using tracker’s database for storage and implementation of First Class Objects and the Gnome 3.0 Model.

How to get rid of processes?

  1. Disabling tracker for globally (for all users)

    1. Edit /etc/xdg/autostart/trackerd.desktop file with root privileges (sudo -i gedit /etc/xdg/autostart/trackerd.desktop)
    2. Add Hidden=true to the end of the file
    3. Do the same for /etc/xdg/autostart/tracker-applet.desktop if you want

  2. Disabling tracker for your user only

    1. Enter the directory ~/.config/autostart, create it if it does not exist
    2. Create a file named trackerd.desktop

    3. Paste the following into the file, save and exit:

      [Desktop Entry] Encoding=UTF-8 Name=Tracker Hidden=true

Source: https://wiki.ubuntu.com/Tracker