What is trackerd and Why Is It Running?
If you've looked at the running processes on your Ubuntu box and wondered why there's a process named "trackerd" that is overusing the CPU, you are in luck, because that's exactly the topic we'll cover today.
Tracker is a search tool built into Ubuntu, and by default seems to be configured to maximize CPU while indexing. We can either throttle it down, or just simply uninstall it if you never use it.
What Exactly Is It?
If you go to Applications \ Accessories, you'll find the Tracker Search Tool in the list. From here you can do a full-text search against your files, and even refine by category.
It's not a bad search tool, really.
Throttle Indexing Speed
What you can do is configure Tracker to not use as much of your CPU, by going to System \ Preferences \ Indexing Preferences.
From here you can choose to completely turn off indexing by unchecking the "Enable indexing" option.
On the performance tab, you can change the slider for Indexing speed from "Faster" all the way down to "Slower". Then you can choose to Minimize memory usage as well.
On the Ignored Files tab, you can also add in paths of files to exclude from the indexing. If you've got a ton of files sitting around that you know you'll never need to search through, there's really no reason to have them in the index.
At this point you can Close the dialog to apply the changes. Note that if your indexing process is still out of control you might have to kill -9 the process ID, or just reboot if you feel like it.
Uninstall Tracker From the Command Line
If you never use the search screen and would simply like to get rid of it, you can open up a terminal and use the following command to remove this process.
sudo apt-get remove tracker tracker-search-tool tracker-utils
Uninstall Tracker From Synaptic
If you prefer, you can search for "tracker" within Synaptic Package Manager and then just uncheck the tracker options in the list. Once you are done, use the Apply button to actually do the uninstall.
Does anybody actually use this search engine?
Nope. I recently switched from Windows to Ubuntu at work and immediately turned this off (I did leave it installed, though). locate and grep aren't that difficult to use so the background noise of indexing just wasn't worth it for me.
I'm a huge fan of Apple's Spotlight search (though I use it through Quicksilver) but as no other OS has as effective (efficient?) a search, I've not really gotten into the habit of searching elsewhere.
I do prefer Beagle, however, to Trackerd, in the Ubuntu world.
And while I LOATHE XP's search utility, I've heard good things (no, really, I have) about Vista's search.
Trackerd is real nice because it's prolly the only desktop search engine I've seen around which has a commandline based search frontend. However the command is pretty long so an alias helps.
Is there any similar commandline frontend for the beagle indexer
Don't use it. I have used the search feature within Gnome Commander. Primarily though I will also just use find or grep. It gets the job done.
(Vista has a good search)
I disagree… I like XP's search better… Since I know what's in my files, I just need to find the file name not if it has 5 upper case letters in the first paragrah.
This program is really fast for searching for files on your computer, and quite light weight…
"Everything"
http://www.voidtools.com/
when i look in my processes it is using 8.4mb and isn't using the cpu at all so for now i will be leaving it on
Honestly, I hate that it chews up CPU cycles to heavily while it's indexing. Gross. Personally, I miss the days of BeOS (a now defunct OS that was purchased by Palm), which had probably the best native search capability of any OS. You could tag any file or folder with any number of custom attributes and really find exactly what you were looking for in a flash.
I have always just used locate (doesn't help that I run slackware and tracker installed). In fact I have gotten so used to locate that I found a program for windows based off of it (except it is gui based). It is called locate32 found here: http://www.locate32.net/
The thing I enjoy the most about it is, it will show a regular context menu in the results. I have my automatic database updates turned off, but you can right click on my computer and select update databases at any time.
well, tracker is a great tool, but the real desktop power search comes in the form of the 'deskbar', which tracker is only a small part of.
so, i don't use tracker explicitly, i use it sometimes when needed through deskbar.
Ok, Trackerd was constantly eating my CPU, but i do lot the faceted (categories) search.
Assuming the "Slower" slider cuts down on that, and I only use Trackerd, should I be disabling Beagle?
Aren't they doing the same thing, and redundantly eating resources and disk? How do I disable beagle completely? The preferences screen doesn't seem to explicitly say "Disable Beagle."
Is there another automatic Search in play anywhere, that should also be disabled?
This is maddening. I set to tracker performance to "slowest," restarted the tracker daemon, and again my entire system started to crawl. Barely does screen draws. Since tracker preferences are set via Ubuntu admin menu, isn' t it really the default search tool? I guess I always thought beagle was.
Since Tracker obviously has a BAD bug, can someone suggest what i ought go be enabling or disabling, to have at least beagle running, or some search facility that doesn't hose my sessions every day? This is what I hate about Linux. The most basic stuff is often unstable. Arggg.. Tips appreciated.
I prefer to just use 'locate' from the command line. Simple, effective, and only updates the database when you tell it to.
Anon: "Personally, I miss the days of BeOS (a now defunct OS that was purchased by Palm), which had probably the best native search capability of any OS. You could tag any file or folder with any number of custom attributes and really find exactly what you were looking for in a flash."
Have you taken a look at Haiku? It's essentially a community driven re-build of BeOS, and while I don't use it myself, it does look quite nice.
@Achanon:
Also worth noting is that Apple hired the developer of the BeFS file system to work on the OS X filesystem.
Catfish is a great front end for "find" or "locate"
I absolutely detest tracker and beagle first thing I do is uninstall!
Recoll has a much better search interface and it works. i.e it actual will find what you are looking for
For search and replace try the "regexxer Search Tool"
Note: the 'find' and 'locate' commands are just for FILENAMES. Tracker searches the CONTENTS of files as well. Very useful if you want to find all the documents where Joe Soap is mentioned. It also searches Evolution emails.
Also note the 'catfish' is a very nice & useful front-end for tracker, available in the repo's.
Don't use Beagle - it needs the Mono framework. I don't trust Mono, because it is based on the Microsoft .NET framework. Who knows when / if MS will decide to sue people using it.
I do agree that tracker can chew CPU, but this is just initially (to build a database) and there after when you copy a file to your HDD. Give it time; after a month or so it will settle down.
I agree that recoll is cool; if you want to unintstall tracker and install recoll + Xapian, go for it.