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

[Martyn Russell <martyn lanedo com>]

On 05/04/2012 01:33 PM, Mauro Carvalho Chehab wrote:
> Em 03-05-2012 11:31, Martyn Russell escreveu:
> > 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.
>
> Yes. latencytop was the took that helped me to point to tracker.
> After removing tracker, the system is now working as I would expect
> for a hardware like that.

Can I suggest you re-install tracker and try cleaning the database after 
setting the locations up and ignored directories properly?

Indexing several kernel source directories is presumably not what you 
intend to do here?

> > > 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.

With 3 heads? Not sure I follow?

> > What version of Tracker are you using?
>
> I've uninstalled it already, to avoid the issues I was noticing, but,
> if I would re-install, it would be installing version
> 0.12.10-1.fc16.

Hmm, seems new enough, 0.14. would be better though :) it has some 
performance efficiencies from 0.12.

> > 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 :)
>
> I didn't make any setup on tracker, so it should be indexing whatever
> default it was. My home directory is _huge_ with a complex tree. It
> takes half an hour to run find ~ |wc.
>
> My user's home directory has 5,722,443 files on it.

Yea, that's quite unusual, but expected if you have a lot of kernel 
check outs. IIRC they're something like 60k files per tarball. We used 
it to test and improve our efficiency, but not to the tune of ~6M files.

> After re-installing it, home dir "recursive" were unmarked, but it

That alone will make a huge difference.

> was enabled for other desktop directories like Download (with has
> lots of files inside it, and several directories where I use to untar
> downloaded stuff, including kernel trees).

Yea, it probably makes sense to uncheck that in your case. It's a bit 
hard to guess how people use their desktops. Generally speaking, the 
Videos, Music, Images, etc XDG locations are fine to recursively index, 
but Downloads can often contain a lot of files and stuff which you don't 
want indexed amongst stuff you do want indexed (i.e. the odd PDF).

> > 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.
>
> SCHED_IDLE option is there on this version. It was not enabled on
> tracker's (or Fedora's) default.

Eeek. Yea, it should be. That really makes a difference.

> Thanks! Mauro

If you've set Tracker up with tracker-preferences, you can use (on the 
command line) tracker-control -rs (-r to reindex and -s to start 
processes). This will create a new DB from scratch for you, so any data 
you had in there will be lost! You can track progress with 
tracker-control -F

I would be interested to know how things fare after that...

It seems in a lot of cases Tracker is not working for people because 
it's not set up in the correct way in the beginning. Sorry you've 
experienced this first hand. It's quite hard to predict user computer 
usage generally but we're improving it all the time.

Thanks,

--
Regards,
Martyn

Founder and CEO of Lanedo GmbH.