Activities launcher slow / unresponsive

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1

Hello,

I just upgraded from F36 to F37. I’m having an issue with the Gnome Activities menu (via the menu or the start button) where after typing the first character in the search, it just becomes unresponsive for thirty seconds or so. It’s fine when it comes back, it is just a pretty annoying delay.

Playing around with the Search options in the Settings, it looks as though the culprit is the Files search. I would like to be able to have that active though.

I’m wondering if there are some cache files I can clean out. Or any other ideas?

Thanks

2

Quite possibly tracker is still building the updated database that is used for such searches and that is causing the momentary hang. If that is the case then leaving the system on overnight should allow it to finish the update and things should return to normal.

3

Thanks for the reply Jeff.

Actually it’s been about a week with the system running continuously (desktop).

Out of curiosity I opened up Files and did some searching directly and it was fast, no issues.

4

You may attempt to delete the tracker database and have it recreated from scratch under the new version:

systemctl --user stop 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
tracker3 reset -s -r

First command should stop all running services, second one deletes and resets the database. Log out then back in after that.

5

Thanks for the suggestion Vanadium.

Unfortunately there was no change in behavior.

6

Something else to try: make (temporarily) a new account and see whether the issue reproduces there.

7

I can confirm it is not an issue with other users

8

So you now know it is a conflict between the new install and your current user configuration data. It is quite safe to wipe out ~/.cache and ~/.local/cache. These will automatically be recreated as needed. It is not said that that will cure the problem, but it could.

1 Like
9

So I tried removing ~/.cache. I did not have a ~/.local/cache. There were some cache directories in other places under ~/.local/ but I didn’t mess with them.

Now it seems better-ish, it’s more inconsistent now. Sometimes it pauses for ten-fifteen seconds, sometimes it just works. IDK, very strange.

In any case, thanks for the suggestions, and if anyone has more, I’m all ears.