I think it’s since when I updated Arch Linux a while ago the tracker-storeprocess has become CPU-hogging and it can drain the battery pretty quickly and turn my laptop into a heater.
Obviously there are people experiencing this issue already, but most of them that I found were trying to disable the Gnome tracker. I’d hesitate to do that because the tracker’s purpose is to index stuff so when I hit the super key and type, relevant things will come up quickly. Also as I’m a big fan of Gnome Shell, I trust the team wouldn’t just release a buggy program and left it broken for months.
My trouble-shooting 101: if I want to see what the program is complaining, run it from the command line!
tracker daemon -s
Starting miners…
** (tracker daemon:24398): CRITICAL **: 10:08:51.616: Could not create proxy on the D-Bus session bus, Error calling StartServiceByName for org.freedesktop.Tracker1.Miner.RSS: Timeout was reached
** (tracker daemon:24398): CRITICAL **: 10:09:16.640: Could not create proxy on the D-Bus session bus, Error calling StartServiceByName for org.freedesktop.Tracker1.Miner.Files: Timeout was reached
** (tracker daemon:24398): CRITICAL **: 10:09:41.663: Could not create proxy on the D-Bus session bus, Error calling StartServiceByName for org.freedesktop.Tracker1.Miner.Extract: Timeout was reached
** (tracker daemon:24398): CRITICAL **: 10:10:06.687: Could not create proxy on the D-Bus session bus, Error calling StartServiceByName for org.freedesktop.Tracker1.Miner.Applications: Timeout was reached
** (tracker daemon:24398): CRITICAL **: 10:10:06.687: No D-Bus proxy found for miner 'org.freedesktop.Tracker1.Miner.RSS'
✗ RSS/ATOM Feeds (perhaps a disabled plugin?)
** (tracker daemon:24398): CRITICAL **: 10:10:06.687: No D-Bus proxy found for miner 'org.freedesktop.Tracker1.Miner.Files'
✗ File System (perhaps a disabled plugin?)
** (tracker daemon:24398): CRITICAL **: 10:10:06.687: No D-Bus proxy found for miner 'org.freedesktop.Tracker1.Miner.Extract'
✗ Extractor (perhaps a disabled plugin?)
** (tracker daemon:24398): CRITICAL **: 10:10:06.687: No D-Bus proxy found for miner 'org.freedesktop.Tracker1.Miner.Applications'
✗ Applications (perhaps a disabled plugin?)
I don’t think those are the root causes though.
Later I found this issue for Gnome 3.12 and I think it could be my case as well. To my surprise this fixed my issue with tracker-store easily.
First, stop tracker-store gracefully with tracker daemon -tThen I found:
ls ~/.cache/tracker/ -lht
total 908M
-rw-r--r-- 1 ray users 32K Dec 26 10:10 meta.db-shm
-rw-r--r-- 1 ray users 132M Dec 26 10:10 meta.db-wal
-rw-r--r-- 1 ray users 776M Oct 4 09:20 meta.db
-rw-r--r-- 1 ray users 11 Oct 4 09:17 locale-for-miner-apps.txt
-rw-r--r-- 1 ray users 22 Aug 2 13:49 parser-version.txt
-rw-r--r-- 1 ray users 354K Apr 13 2018 ontologies.gvdb
-rw-r--r-- 1 ray users 11 Apr 13 2018 db-locale.txt
-rw-r--r-- 1 ray users 6 Apr 8 2017 first-index.txt
-rw-r--r-- 1 ray users 10 Apr 8 2017 last-crawl.txt
-rw-r--r-- 1 ray users 40 Apr 8 2017 parser-sha1.txt
-rw-r--r-- 1 ray users 2 Apr 8 2017 db-version.txt
ls ~/.local/share/tracker/data -lht
total 77M
-rw-r----- 1 ray users 16M Oct 4 09:17 tracker-store.journal
-rw-r--r-- 1 ray users 8.8M Apr 13 2018 tracker-store.journal.7.gz
-rw-r--r-- 1 ray users 8.6M Apr 13 2018 tracker-store.journal.6.gz
-rw-r--r-- 1 ray users 9.1M Apr 13 2018 tracker-store.journal.5.gz
-rw-r--r-- 1 ray users 8.5M Apr 13 2018 tracker-store.journal.4.gz
-rw-r----- 1 ray users 148K Apr 13 2018 tracker-store.ontology.journal
-rw-r--r-- 1 ray users 8.3M Jun 19 2017 tracker-store.journal.3.gz
-rw-r--r-- 1 ray users 9.1M Jun 18 2017 tracker-store.journal.2.gz
-rw-r--r-- 1 ray users 8.8M Apr 8 2017 tracker-store.journal.1.gz
The 776MB meta.db surely is bloated, as I only have around 200GB of personal files. Since they are only meta-data, deletion won’t hurt.
rm -rf ~/.cache/tracker/
rm -rf ~/.local/share/tracker/
tracker daemon -s
Starting miners…
✓ RSS/ATOM Feeds
✓ File System
✓ Extractor
✓ Applications
All good now 🙂