Bug 1613103 - Provide a user-friendly method of disabling tracker
Summary: Provide a user-friendly method of disabling tracker
Keywords:
Status: NEW
Alias: None
Product: Fedora
Classification: Fedora
Component: tracker
Version: 42
Hardware: Unspecified
OS: Unspecified
unspecified
unspecified
Target Milestone: ---
Assignee: Carlos Garnacho
QA Contact: Fedora Extras Quality Assurance
URL:
Whiteboard:
Depends On:
Blocks:
TreeView+ depends on / blocked
 
Reported: 2018-08-07 02:14 UTC by Aaron Sowry
Modified: 2025-04-18 16:03 UTC (History)
22 users (show)

Fixed In Version:
Clone Of:
Environment:
Last Closed: 2020-05-26 16:21:31 UTC
Type: Bug
Embargoed:


Attachments (Terms of Use)

Description Aaron Sowry 2018-08-07 02:14:01 UTC
In a number of situations, tracker can be found consuming system resources to the point where the system becomes unstable and/or unusable. Some users may also wish to disable tracker for reasons of privacy, performance, or personal preference.

Currently, there is no simple or easily accessible way to disable tracker. Fedora should explicitly support disabling this service, and provide a means to make doing so easy for users.

Additional info: See bug #747689

Comment 1 Gerd v. Egidy 2018-08-07 07:19:54 UTC
This solution should be permanent, so that it isn't disabled by dnf updates or by installing another rpm package which pulls it in again as dependency.

Comment 2 Toomas Kaevand 2018-08-07 09:41:49 UTC
Option to disable Tracker is very necessary.

Lately I have huge problems with Tracker - it consumes all of available RAM and CPU resources. 

Under F28 (Gnome or Cinnamon session) after logging in and some idle time (3-4 hours) the Tracker tends to use 6-8 GB of RAM (or all the available memory) and all of the available CPU time. The Tracker database itself is ~300 MB.

Comment 3 Thomas Cameron 2018-08-07 15:24:31 UTC
I'm not part of support or engineering, I'm just posting this in case it's helpful. I use F27 with XFCE. I disabled tracker by choosing Applications/Settings/Settings Manager/Session and Startup/Application Autostart. I unchecked the boxes next to all the Tracker stuff. 

Then, from the command line, I ran:
tracker daemon -k # kills all tracker processes
tracker daemon --list-processes # checks that they're all dead
rm -rf ~/.local/share/tracker/ # deletes tracker log data
rm -rf ~/.cache/tracker/ # deletes tracker data

This *should* do what you want, I think.

In Gnome 3, open Settings, then choose Search, and in the upper right side of the window, toggle search off. 

Then clear the tracker configs as I indicated above.

Comment 4 Doncho Gunchev 2018-08-07 17:16:38 UTC
Please add a permanent general (all users) solution for the problem. We can disable SeLinux with a simple file in /etc, why not do the same thing in this case?

Comment 5 Sergio Basto 2018-08-07 20:07:56 UTC
and /usr/bin/tracker daemon stop ?

Comment 6 Aaron Sowry 2018-08-07 20:22:04 UTC
(In reply to Thomas Cameron from comment #3)
> I'm not part of support or engineering, I'm just posting this in case it's
> helpful. I use F27 with XFCE. I disabled tracker by choosing
> Applications/Settings/Settings Manager/Session and Startup/Application
> Autostart. I unchecked the boxes next to all the Tracker stuff. 
> 
> Then, from the command line, I ran:
> tracker daemon -k # kills all tracker processes
> tracker daemon --list-processes # checks that they're all dead
> rm -rf ~/.local/share/tracker/ # deletes tracker log data
> rm -rf ~/.cache/tracker/ # deletes tracker data
> 
> This *should* do what you want, I think.

I can confirm that "tracker daemon -k" kills tracker and prevents it respawning on F28.

> In Gnome 3, open Settings, then choose Search, and in the upper right side
> of the window, toggle search off. 

This has no effect on tracker, as far as I can tell. With "Search" disabled, tracker still runs. With "Search" enabled, but all sub-settings disabled, tracker also still runs.

Comment 7 Stiliyan Sabchew 2019-01-22 07:48:21 UTC
+1 to Please add a permanent general (all users) solution for the problem.

Comment 8 Ben Cotton 2019-05-02 19:46:54 UTC
This message is a reminder that Fedora 28 is nearing its end of life.
On 2019-May-28 Fedora will stop maintaining and issuing updates for
Fedora 28. It is Fedora's policy to close all bug reports from releases
that are no longer maintained. At that time this bug will be closed as
EOL if it remains open with a Fedora 'version' of '28'.

Package Maintainer: If you wish for this bug to remain open because you
plan to fix it in a currently maintained version, simply change the 'version' 
to a later Fedora version.

Thank you for reporting this issue and we are sorry that we were not 
able to fix it before Fedora 28 is end of life. If you would still like 
to see this bug fixed and are able to reproduce it against a later version 
of Fedora, you are encouraged  change the 'version' to a later Fedora 
version prior this bug is closed as described in the policy above.

Although we aim to fix as many bugs as possible during every release's 
lifetime, sometimes those efforts are overtaken by events. Often a 
more recent Fedora release includes newer upstream software that fixes 
bugs or makes them obsolete.

Comment 9 Ben Cotton 2019-05-28 23:47:42 UTC
Fedora 28 changed to end-of-life (EOL) status on 2019-05-28. Fedora 28 is
no longer maintained, which means that it will not receive any further
security or bug fix updates. As a result we are closing this bug.

If you can reproduce this bug against a currently maintained version of
Fedora please feel free to reopen this bug against that version. If you
are unable to reopen this bug, please file a new report against the
current release. If you experience problems, please add a comment to this
bug.

Thank you for reporting this bug and we are sorry it could not be fixed.

Comment 10 Ron Yorston 2019-05-29 07:35:25 UTC
How do we get this reopened? Because it's still a problem in F30.

Comment 11 Beni Paskin-Cherniavsky 2019-05-29 11:23:16 UTC
Ron, reopening based on your comment.
Can you provide more info — are you seeing tracker consume significant resources on F30?

For myself I feel it's become better, but that's anecdotal.

I know ubuntu 19.04 enabled Tracker by default, and what do you know, https://askubuntu.com/questions/1146074/after-upgrading-from-18-10-to-19-04-tracker-extract-eats-up-so-much-ram-it-fr :-)

Comment 12 Ron Yorston 2019-05-29 11:51:02 UTC
Thanks, Beni.

Tracker doesn't consume significant resources in my F30 installations because I put 'chmod -x /usr/libexec/tracker-*' in my rc.local.  I'd prefer a supported way to disable it, though.

Comment 13 Steinar Knutsen 2019-05-31 11:09:40 UTC
I created a Bugzilla account for the sole purpose of commenting on this ticket. I ended up removing the tracker package and just living with the mess. I don't use Gnome, so something permanent which works for all users across the system is something I would be really happy about too.

Comment 14 Ben Beasley 2019-07-13 14:27:41 UTC
> Can you provide more info — are you seeing tracker consume significant resources on F30?

For me, it’s pretty good at staying out of the way these days if you have an SSD. I don’t have Fedora on a system with an HDD, but disk I/O was always how tracker would bring systems to a crawl even though it was running at a low priority. I do have CentOS 7 systems with HDDs, and tracker remains an annoyance there.

The thing is, regardless of whether it consumes significant resources, we ought to be able to reliably disable something that crashes with SIGSEGV or SIGABRT every few days, particularly when we find it provides little or no value in exchange.

Comment 15 Ben Cotton 2020-04-30 21:28:06 UTC
This message is a reminder that Fedora 30 is nearing its end of life.
Fedora will stop maintaining and issuing updates for Fedora 30 on 2020-05-26.
It is Fedora's policy to close all bug reports from releases that are no longer
maintained. At that time this bug will be closed as EOL if it remains open with a
Fedora 'version' of '30'.

Package Maintainer: If you wish for this bug to remain open because you
plan to fix it in a currently maintained version, simply change the 'version' 
to a later Fedora version.

Thank you for reporting this issue and we are sorry that we were not 
able to fix it before Fedora 30 is end of life. If you would still like 
to see this bug fixed and are able to reproduce it against a later version 
of Fedora, you are encouraged  change the 'version' to a later Fedora 
version prior this bug is closed as described in the policy above.

Although we aim to fix as many bugs as possible during every release's 
lifetime, sometimes those efforts are overtaken by events. Often a 
more recent Fedora release includes newer upstream software that fixes 
bugs or makes them obsolete.

Comment 16 Ben Cotton 2020-05-26 16:21:31 UTC
Fedora 30 changed to end-of-life (EOL) status on 2020-05-26. Fedora 30 is
no longer maintained, which means that it will not receive any further
security or bug fix updates. As a result we are closing this bug.

If you can reproduce this bug against a currently maintained version of
Fedora please feel free to reopen this bug against that version. If you
are unable to reopen this bug, please file a new report against the
current release. If you experience problems, please add a comment to this
bug.

Thank you for reporting this bug and we are sorry it could not be fixed.

Comment 17 Sergio Basto 2020-05-26 16:50:55 UTC
Best solution still be: 

    rpm -e tracker tracker-miners --nodeps

Comment 18 Ben Cotton 2020-08-11 13:05:14 UTC
This bug appears to have been reported against 'rawhide' during the Fedora 33 development cycle.
Changing version to 33.

Comment 19 Doncho Gunchev 2021-02-22 14:17:10 UTC
Nowadays SSDs are fast but writes reduce their life. Somehow tracker got reinstalled again (after upgrade to Fedora 33 or installed gnome-photos to try, IDK).

Luckily "dnf remove tracker" only removes:
 - tracker, tracker-miners, gnome-online-miners, libtracker-control, libtracker-miner, libtracker-sparql, libzapojit 
and one app:
 - gnome-photos

So now I can remove it without nodeps, but I use KDE/LXQT, not Gnome. Fedora 33, 5.10.16-200.fc33.x86_64.

Comment 20 Richard W.M. Jones 2021-02-22 14:24:20 UTC
The true "fix" for this is to add this to your ~/.bashrc:

# Kill with fire.
killall -9 -r tracker-.* >& /dev/null

Comment 21 Sergio Basto 2021-03-29 21:32:54 UTC
Hi, 

In Centos 8 Stream we have the same problem

Comment 22 Ben Cotton 2021-11-04 14:49:19 UTC
This message is a reminder that Fedora 33 is nearing its end of life.
Fedora will stop maintaining and issuing updates for Fedora 33 on 2021-11-30.
It is Fedora's policy to close all bug reports from releases that are no longer
maintained. At that time this bug will be closed as EOL if it remains open with a
Fedora 'version' of '33'.

Package Maintainer: If you wish for this bug to remain open because you
plan to fix it in a currently maintained version, simply change the 'version' 
to a later Fedora version.

Thank you for reporting this issue and we are sorry that we were not 
able to fix it before Fedora 33 is end of life. If you would still like 
to see this bug fixed and are able to reproduce it against a later version 
of Fedora, you are encouraged  change the 'version' to a later Fedora 
version prior this bug is closed as described in the policy above.

Although we aim to fix as many bugs as possible during every release's 
lifetime, sometimes those efforts are overtaken by events. Often a 
more recent Fedora release includes newer upstream software that fixes 
bugs or makes them obsolete.

Comment 23 Ben Cotton 2021-11-04 15:47:41 UTC
This message is a reminder that Fedora 33 is nearing its end of life.
Fedora will stop maintaining and issuing updates for Fedora 33 on 2021-11-30.
It is Fedora's policy to close all bug reports from releases that are no longer
maintained. At that time this bug will be closed as EOL if it remains open with a
Fedora 'version' of '33'.

Package Maintainer: If you wish for this bug to remain open because you
plan to fix it in a currently maintained version, simply change the 'version' 
to a later Fedora version.

Thank you for reporting this issue and we are sorry that we were not 
able to fix it before Fedora 33 is end of life. If you would still like 
to see this bug fixed and are able to reproduce it against a later version 
of Fedora, you are encouraged  change the 'version' to a later Fedora 
version prior this bug is closed as described in the policy above.

Although we aim to fix as many bugs as possible during every release's 
lifetime, sometimes those efforts are overtaken by events. Often a 
more recent Fedora release includes newer upstream software that fixes 
bugs or makes them obsolete.

Comment 24 Ben Cotton 2022-02-08 21:12:22 UTC
This bug appears to have been reported against 'rawhide' during the Fedora 36 development cycle.
Changing version to 36.

Comment 25 Ben Cotton 2023-04-25 16:38:43 UTC
This message is a reminder that Fedora Linux 36 is nearing its end of life.
Fedora will stop maintaining and issuing updates for Fedora Linux 36 on 2023-05-16.
It is Fedora's policy to close all bug reports from releases that are no longer
maintained. At that time this bug will be closed as EOL if it remains open with a
'version' of '36'.

Package Maintainer: If you wish for this bug to remain open because you
plan to fix it in a currently maintained version, change the 'version' 
to a later Fedora Linux version. Note that the version field may be hidden.
Click the "Show advanced fields" button if you do not see it.

Thank you for reporting this issue and we are sorry that we were not 
able to fix it before Fedora Linux 36 is end of life. If you would still like 
to see this bug fixed and are able to reproduce it against a later version 
of Fedora Linux, you are encouraged to change the 'version' to a later version
prior to this bug being closed.

Comment 26 Fedora Release Engineering 2023-08-16 07:04:17 UTC
This bug appears to have been reported against 'rawhide' during the Fedora Linux 39 development cycle.
Changing version to 39.

Comment 27 Aaron Lu 2024-04-19 12:10:04 UTC
Is there any value of running tracker-miner in non-gnome environment?
I don't see any so I removed it, but would like to know if otherwise.

Comment 28 Aoife Moloney 2024-11-08 10:39:51 UTC
This message is a reminder that Fedora Linux 39 is nearing its end of life.
Fedora will stop maintaining and issuing updates for Fedora Linux 39 on 2024-11-26.
It is Fedora's policy to close all bug reports from releases that are no longer
maintained. At that time this bug will be closed as EOL if it remains open with a
'version' of '39'.

Package Maintainer: If you wish for this bug to remain open because you
plan to fix it in a currently maintained version, change the 'version' 
to a later Fedora Linux version. Note that the version field may be hidden.
Click the "Show advanced fields" button if you do not see it.

Thank you for reporting this issue and we are sorry that we were not 
able to fix it before Fedora Linux 39 is end of life. If you would still like 
to see this bug fixed and are able to reproduce it against a later version 
of Fedora Linux, you are encouraged to change the 'version' to a later version
prior to this bug being closed.

Comment 29 Richard W.M. Jones 2024-11-12 08:25:49 UTC
The "user-friendly" method is still to put this into .bashrc:

# Kill tracker with fire.
killall -9 -r tracker-.* >& /dev/null

Comment 30 Aoife Moloney 2025-02-26 12:50:29 UTC
This bug appears to have been reported against 'rawhide' during the Fedora Linux 42 development cycle.
Changing version to 42.

Comment 31 Ron Yorston 2025-04-18 16:03:54 UTC
It seems that 'tracker' has been replaced by 'localsearch' in Fedora 42.

I've changed the command in my rc.local to 'chmod -x /usr/libexec/localsearch-*'.


Note You need to log in before you can comment on or make changes to this bug.