Localsearch-3 and localsearch-extractor-3 processes taking CPU and refuse to be killed

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1

Fedora 43 KDE. Title says all. Just a week after solving the problem of Baloo burning my CPU and thrashing my drive, now I’ve got these localsearch-3 and localsearch-extractor-3 processes that randomly pop up, eat my CPU, and refuse to be killed.

I send the “kill” signal via System Monitor, and they pop right back up instantly, still burning away. Only a reboot gets them to go away, but they always come back in a day or two.

And it’s not like they’re building an index either. I’ve let them go for over 24 hours, hoping they’ll finish up, but they never do.

Given that these seem to be Gnome-related file search processes, how do I block them from running? I’ve disabled Baloo by turning off Indexing via System Settings, but I’m not finding any answers on how to keep these processes from eating my CPU alive.

Help please!

2

have you tried removing them with dnf remove ?

3

$ sudo dnf search installed localsearch* keeps telling me no matches found. Doesn’t even return results when using the exact name of the process. Must be a part of a larger package.

4

Find the pid of the problematic processes, with something like top btop or ps and then find their parent processes ppid with ps -ef

If you eventually fimd that its a KDE function, then you will have trouble removing it. If you somehow got infected with Gnome, removal should be possible.

And have a look at system monitor tool, it should be able to show you a dependency tree

5

sudo dnf list --installed localsearch*

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Oh duh. Output:

Installed packages
localsearch.x86_64 3.10.2-1.fc43

@theprogram mentioned somehow getting infected with Gnome, and I think that’s what happened. The Music app I was trying turns out to be Gnome’s music app, and that’s about when the localsearch issues started.

I still hesitate to sudo dnf remove localsearch* cuz there are a few things in there and I don’t want something else to break:

Package Arch Version Repository Size
Removing:
localsearch x86_64 3.10.2-1.fc43 3.4 MiB
Removing unused dependencies:
exempi x86_64 2.6.4-8.fc43 1.4 MiB
libcue x86_64 2.3.0-12.fc43 85.8 KiB
libgsf x86_64 1.14.54-1.fc43 964.9 KiB
libgxps x86_64 0.3.2-11.fc43 188.1 KiB
libiptcdata x86_64 1.0.5-23.fc43 163.9 KiB
libosinfo x86_64 1.12.0-3.fc43 1.2 MiB
osinfo-db noarch 20250124-2.fc43 3.9 MiB
osinfo-db-tools x86_64 1.12.0-4.fc43 190.9 KiB
poppler-glib x86_64 25.07.0-3.fc43 633.9 KiB
totem-pl-parser x86_64 3.26.6-13.fc43 308.5 KiB
uchardet x86_64 0.0.8-8.fc43 275.6 KiB

Transaction Summary:
Removing: 12 packages

After this operation, 13 MiB will be freed (install 0 B, remove 13 MiB).

Is there a dnf command to see what might depend on localsearch?

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7

those packages you listed are what will be removed.

If you also try removing totem, you should get the same list.

You can remove those files, if needed you can put them back.

For a music player, I use rhythmbox

8

I systematically used to disable tracker, but nowadays, I have good experience disabling all file content searches. In Search (Settings), under “Search Locations”, disable everything. This should stop the “mining” of files (for metadata and contents), but still keep file name search in Files snappy.

Then it may be good to clean out the database: it may be corrupt in your case. I see no other way than

  1. Log out of your account
  2. Log in on a virtual console, and delete the cache files: rm -rf ~/.cache/tracker3 (the old name remained here).

When you log back in, a new database will be created, but as you are not mining files, it will remain small (9.3 M on my system).

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