"tracker" is filling up a filesystem. How to disable it from running?
 

I recently got a message that my "/home" filesystem was at 98% utilization. After some digging around, I discovered that there was a huge amount of data under "$HOME/.cache/tracker". From what I've been able to figure out, "tracker" is Gnome's version of the same so-called "semantic desktop" that "akonadi tries to pull off in KDE.

I deleted the contents of "$HOME/.cache/tracker" but this morning it's been repopulated and will, I'm assuming, continue in its mission to fill up "/home" with data that I'm not using.

Now, I can't stand the load that "akonadi" puts on my system so I'm constantly having to kill it off. NOW... I've got "tracker" to deal with. The worst of it is that I'm not even using the Gnome desktop. (Though I might have launched a Gnome application; both Gnome and KDE were selected during installation.)

So my question(s):

* Any ideas on what I might have accidentally executed to wake up "tracker"?

* If I de-install it, what might break?

* Is there a Gnome configuration tool that will allow me to disable "tracker" once and for all? (Not that I expect to do much good since I've disabled the "semantic desktop" in KDE and that doesn't prevent "akonadi" from filling up the process table with dozens of processes.)

TIA for any and all hints and tips that you have to offer.

--
Rick

Maybe

What might break? - whatever bit of gnome you are using :-D.
Yes, it's a behemoth but it has been solved before
https://ask.fedoraproject.org/en/que...sable-tracker/
http://askubuntu.com/questions/34621...-every-startup
https://www.linuxquestions.org/quest...ng-4175515364/

All from the first page of google search on "disable gnome tracker"

About the only thing that I use that depends on it (maybe) would be Evolution. And that's only when Thunderbird acts up. Sometimes T'bird doesn't start up without spinning its wheels while scanning folders and I kill it and fire up Evolution so I can get into my email quickly. I never use the email search functions as I find it easy enough to grep within the Maildir directly. But if Evolution is what started the disk space consumption to take place then it's goodbye Evolution.

Sorry about that. I did a search on LQ but the first couple of screens of results didn't seem to fit the bill. (Guess my search criteria weren't specific enough.)

I stumbled on[*] the "tracker-preferences" utility and disabled "tracking" in all the folders that had been checked and disabled most cases where it might try and resume filling up my "/home" filesystem. If it tries now, it'll, hopefully, take longer for it to eat up all available disk space. There didn't appear to be a "never, ever do this" switch, though. Clever as it is, the "/dev/null" workaround doesn't deal with tracker needlessly eating up the CPU when sending all the data to the bit bucket. I've made a mental note to make a list of any old Gnome utilities that I've grown used to during my use of the older Gnome desktop and switching to the KDE equivalents. Come next OS upgrade time, I'll just leave anything Gnome-related out the installation process.

First Beagle, then Akonadi, and now Tracker. You'd think someone would figure out that there's a fair number of users out there that don't want any of those things and make it "opt-in". :D

Thanks for the URLs. I have some "leisure" reading to do.

--
Rick

[*] -- Frustratingly, "tracker" doesn't have a manpage. (Neither does "akonadi" for that matter.) Luckily, I eventually got around to "apropos tracker" which did return some interesting results and I eventually found the preferences setting (or "unsetting" as it turned out) utility.

Both gnome and kde are bloated beyond anything you want because they have guys who don't perfect what is there but continue writing new code.

XFCE is offered in Slackware as a "low cholesterol window manager." It seems to be gaining a little with every release, but at a much slower pace than gnome. And there are lower cholesterol and lighter ones also. One or two have basically nothing but a few xterms. And all the utilities you want are out there as X programs.