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

[Mauro Carvalho Chehab <mchehab redhat com>]

Em 03-05-2012 11:31, Martyn Russell escreveu:
> 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.

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.

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

I can't remember what it was taking more time.

> > 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?

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.

> 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.

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

> 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.

> Thank you for reporting these issues,

Thanks!
Mauro