In my existing Fedora 39 installation, I had already masked the tracker-extract-3.service because I don’t want it to index file contents, while I’m fine with tracker indexing file names.
I’ve just upgraded to Fedora 40 and the tracker-extract process is running and eating most of the CPU.
The service is masked (I tried both at the user level and system level):
❯ systemctl status tracker-extract-3
Warning: The unit file, source configuration file or drop-ins of tracker-extract-3.service changed on disk. Run 'systemctl daemon-reload' to reload units.
○ tracker-extract-3.service
Loaded: masked (Reason: Unit tracker-extract-3.service is masked.)
Drop-In: /usr/lib/systemd/system/service.d
└─10-timeout-abort.conf
Active: inactive (dead)
but there’s no way to stop it, not even with sudo systemctl stop tracker-extract-3.
Masking the tracker extract service has always worked for me before in all my Gnome installations (Fedora, Ubuntu, Arch).
If I understand correctly, that disables tracker entirely, which I don’t want, see my original post.
I only want to disable the search into file contents, which is what tracker-extract does.
I have also just upgraded, but for me, there definitely is no tracker process running. I have exactly the same output as you, but I do not see any tracker related processed in ps ax. Unfortunately, that does not help you specifically right now.
As far as I know, it is only possible to fully disable tracker, or not. Without tracker, Nautilus still finds file names. It is the tracker process that launches the “miner” when needed. Afaik, there is no way to configure a running tracker not to index file contents.
PID USER PR NI VIRT RES SHR S %CPU %MEM TIME+ COMMAND
177113 user 39 19 3996856 1,0g 70464 S 104,3 3,3 243:51.41 tracker-extract
54004 user 39 19 1195640 60040 18364 S 33,9 0,2 25:08.92 tracker-miner-f
My old approach was to uninstall tracker. That became impossible when tracker became a hard dependency of nautilus. I am not sure if one can go on without not disabling all of the tracker services. I have the impression that a tracker service is automatically started when it is needed by another component.
That is how I disabled tracker when installing Fedora 38, from which I upgraded each time:
Interesting. Thanks for digging into it. I always fully disabled Tracker, and it still is after my upgrade to Fedora 40. Fully disabling Tracker disables file searching in the Activities overview, but does not disable file name search in Nautilus. In Nautilus, I never had issues with performance. It could be that file name search is faster with Tracker enabled.
After upgrade to kernel 6.9.7-100.fc39.x86_64 #1 SMP PREEMPT_DYNAMIC Thu Jun 27 18:06:32 UTC 2024 x86_64 GNU/Linux a couple of days ago my weekly backup was still running after 10 hours, it normally completes after about 5 hours… I found that the tracker process was using 97% of CPU. This had not been happening prior. I killed the process and everything speed up tremendously.
https://discussion.fedoraproject.org/t/tracker-miner-service-causing-high-cpu-usage/115906/11
On my computer, tracker-extract-3 is constantly pushing the processor to full capacity, it takes a few seconds. Then it backs off for a few seconds. Then it again pushes the processor to full capacity. The problem happens often when I have gnome-software v46.5 open under “Softwares”. Honestly, it’s draining my CPU like digging for coins. I suspect it might be a Cryptojacking infection.
Since the issue is related to tracker-miner services, it seems that tracker-extract-3 is also merged under gnome gitlab issue: https://gitlab.gnome.org/GNOME/localsearch/-/issues/340