Re: [Tracker] Tracker is dropping the responsiveness of my desktop

[Martyn Russell <martyn lanedo com>]

On 04/27/2012 03:52 PM, Mauro Carvalho Chehab wrote:
> Hi,

Hello Mauro,

> I have about 1.5 TB of disks here (2 SATA disks) on a high performance workstation
> with 2 quad-core Xeon CPUs, 4-channel FB-DIMM rams and 3 heads using an ATI r600 GPU.

So hardly a trivial piece of kit ;)

> Since some time, I was experiencing very bad latency effects when using X11 applications.
> From time to time, all X applications used to pause their work during _several_ seconds.
> It were affecting everything, including shells. I tried even to disable swap, as my first
> suspect was that the system were doing too many swaps, as this machine only has 4GB ram,
> but swap were not the cause of the issues.
>
> The very high latency happens when very high disk I/O is produced, like when compiling
> the Linux Kernel (using ccache).

I was going to ask you to try powertop to see if it really was Tracker 
causing the problems, but you seem to have solved that already.

In particular, I would be interested to know if it was miner-fs or the 
store process.

> Only today I finally discovered what application where hurting the system: tracker. After
> removing tracker from my system (and deleting the 4GB tracker cache), my system is now
> working as expected.

How much content are you indexing?

4Gb sounds quite excessive and not what we would expect.

> I've no idea why tracker added so much performance penalties to my system, nor why
> it was enabled on my system (I'm sure I never enabled it, as I don't even use Gnome
> window manager here as xfce4 so far gave me the best results with 3 heads), but I'd
> like to report you about those issues.

What version of Tracker are you using?

Is it possible you're indexing content which shouldn't be indexed? We 
try to avoid indexing content recursively in $HOME (for example) because 
there are cases where you don't want to index everything (e.g. a 
LibreOffice code base check out :)

Using tracker-preferences, you should be able to set a few things here, 
like:

 - Locations
 - Ignored directory/file patterns
 - How Tracker behaves (e.g. using SCHED_IDLE to avoid monopolistic
   behaviour over your system when you're using it). I believe the
   setting is "Only when computer is not being used". This depends on
   your tracker version though.

Thank you for reporting these issues,

--
Regards,
Martyn

Founder and CEO of Lanedo GmbH.