Disable Gnome Tracker

Last modified by Thomas Coelho (local) on 2023/05/16 09:59

Gnome Tracker (in our system 22.04 tracker3) is the full text indexing and search service of gnome. Depending on the size on type of your file this may introduce a significant load on the file servers and the client. Sometimes the tracker database gets corrupted. The reason for this is currently not clear. This article should give some hints to control and fix the behavior of this service.

Diagnostics

Tracker uses several helper programs to get the required data from your files. This is 'tracker-miner-fs-3' and 'tracker-extract-3'. You can use top or any other load monitor to check the processes. If they are on the top of the most active processes and you see a high system load. With an Idle desktop the load should be lower then 1.0:

   top - 11:03:08 up  2:41,  2 users,  load average: 1.17, 1.29, 1.37

GUI Tools

Command line tools

tracker3 status

tracker3 reset -r -s

Completely disable the services

The service is base on user systemd service, which can be disabled by overwriting:

systemctl --user mask tracker-extract-3.service tracker-miner-fs-3.service tracker-miner-rss-3.service tracker-writeback-3.service tracker-xdg-portal-3.service tracker-miner-fs-control-3.service

The service is disabled system wide on the login server.