How to disable tracker miner

Ask Fedora
1

As far as I can understand, tracker is an useful tool that runs in the background of Fedora Workstation (and maybe other spins, I don’t know) which work is to index files and speed up research of files.

Sometime, in some scenarios, such service could be a resource hog. And a user would be happy to disable it.

Surfing the internet there are various solutions. Which is the most elegant way to disable tracker?

This could be a solution:

gsettings set org.freedesktop.Tracker.Miner.Files enable-monitors false
gsettings set org.freedesktop.Tracker.Miner.Files ignored-files "['*']"
gsettings set org.freedesktop.Tracker.Miner.Files crawling-interval -2

pkill tracker

Someone else suggests to follow these steps:

tracker daemon -t
cd ~/.config/autostart
cp -v /etc/xdg/autostart/tracker-* ./
for FILE in `ls`; do echo Hidden=true >> $FILE; done
rm -rf ~/.cache/tracker ~/.local/share/tracker

And somebody else says to to open GNOME Settings and disable Search

Screenshot%20from%202019-05-15%2016-12-55

2 Likes
2

Well, there has been an open ticket for that since at least 2011… :slight_smile: The tickets below have some methods other people have used.

https://bugzilla.redhat.com/show_bug.cgi?id=747689

1613103 – Provide a user-friendly method of disabling tracker

3

Speaking of user-friendliness, options in the desktop settings app would be awesome, where people can also assure themselves, that it won’t shoot off on external drives or when power is unplugged – questions that come up automatically.

It’s unnerving on old machines when you need performance for other things.

4

I’m not user friendy oriented. I’m from the DOS 2, Linux 0.9 era and I’m a lot more comfortable with the command line than any GUI. Icons don’t speak to me since toyota introduced them in cars in th 70s.

IIRC, I disabled tracker the first week F38 was installed with systemctl --user mask tracker-xdg-portal-3.service tracker-writeback-3.service tracker-miner-rss-3.service tracker-miner-fs-control-3.service tracker-miner-fs-3.service

3 Likes
5

On the Fedora 40 around here it brings: Failed to connect to bus: No medium found.

The miner also seems to be un-mounting manually mounted drives. Can that be?

6

F40 here too. Current status:

$ systemctl --user status tracker-xdg-portal-3.service tracker-writeback-3.service tracker-miner-rss-3.service tracker-miner-fs-control-3.service tracker-miner-fs-3.service
○ tracker-xdg-portal-3.service - Tracker portal service
     Loaded: loaded (/usr/lib/systemd/user/tracker-xdg-portal-3.service; static)
    Drop-In: /usr/lib/systemd/user/tracker-.service.d
○ tracker-xdg-portal-3.service - Tracker portal service
     Loaded: loaded (/usr/lib/systemd/user/tracker-xdg-portal-3.service; static)
    Drop-In: /usr/lib/systemd/user/tracker-.service.d
             └─00-uresourced.conf
             /usr/lib/systemd/user/service.d
             └─10-timeout-abort.conf
     Active: inactive (dead)

○ tracker-writeback-3.service - Tracker data writeback service
     Loaded: loaded (/usr/lib/systemd/user/tracker-writeback-3.service; static)
    Drop-In: /usr/lib/systemd/user/tracker-.service.d
             └─00-uresourced.conf
             /usr/lib/systemd/user/service.d
             └─10-timeout-abort.conf
     Active: inactive (dead)

○ tracker-miner-rss-3.service - Tracker RSS/ATOM feed data miner
     Loaded: loaded (/usr/lib/systemd/user/tracker-miner-rss-3.service; disabled; preset: disabled)
    Drop-In: /usr/lib/systemd/user/tracker-.service.d
             └─00-uresourced.conf
             /usr/lib/systemd/user/service.d
             └─10-timeout-abort.conf
     Active: inactive (dead)

○ tracker-miner-fs-control-3.service - Tracker Filesystem Indexing Proxy
     Loaded: loaded (/usr/lib/systemd/user/tracker-miner-fs-control-3.service; static)
    Drop-In: /usr/lib/systemd/user/tracker-.service.d
             └─00-uresourced.conf
             /usr/lib/systemd/user/service.d
             └─10-timeout-abort.conf
     Active: inactive (dead)

○ tracker-miner-fs-3.service - Tracker file system data miner
     Loaded: loaded (/usr/lib/systemd/user/tracker-miner-fs-3.service; disabled; preset: disabled)
    Drop-In: /usr/lib/systemd/user/tracker-.service.d
             └─00-uresourced.conf

~$ dnf list installed *tracker*

Paquets installés
libtracker-sparql.i686                                                           3.7.3-1.fc40                                                           @updates
libtracker-sparql.x86_64                                                         3.7.3-1.fc40                                                           @updates
mesa-libxatracker.x86_64                                                         24.1.5-2.fc40                                                          @updates
tracker.x86_64                                                                   3.7.3-1.fc40                                                           @updates
tracker-miners.x86_64                                                            3.7.3-1.fc40                                                           @updates
7

Couldn’t tell. I’ve disabled it following a fresh F38 install last october. No need for that when there is the locate database already.

8

Correct me if I’m wrong, and call me crazy, but wouldn’t it just be much much simpler to go to Applications> Settings> Session & Startup > [Application Autostart tab] and then deselect
Tracker File System Miner
Tracker RSS/Atom Feeds Miner
in the list? and then go relog ? -headscratching-

9

Are you talking about KDE or GNOME?

10

Actually I was specifically looking at the applications menu in my XFCE instance presuming that with regards to Fedora at least, the menu would be the same or similar for other wm’s in the default fedora ecosystem