Understanding about tracker and tracker-miner-f in linux.

Tracker is the file indexing service to quickly get your search results when searching through the File Systems.

It is used to crawl the file system to mine data. You might noticed the tracker-miner-f is eating up the CPU load to 100%. Usually it will initiate automatically and stops when it is finished mining. Tracker will start while booting the device every time or when any changes happened to the file system.

Yes. In some cases it may block the system to hung or making slower in response. Killing the tracker is the only way to proceed further. There are few methods to handle the tracker’s heavy CPU load.

Tracker Hard Reset

Execute the following command to hard reset. It means you can clear the tracker database which are stored as indexes. It will helpful if the mining is struck or hung due to some files blocked for indexing.

Before resetting the tracker check the status to know the current tracker size

tracker status

tracker reset --hard

Also you can regain some GB’s of storage while you hard reset the tracker. After resetting the tracker , check the tracker status

tracker status

See now the differences in the Remaining disk space. It is not good practice to reset the tracker-store frequently. But doing this occasionally may be helps to fix the high CPU usage.

In another way some people will suggest to disable the tracker-minor permanently. That may be the solution, but it will leads to some other applications like File Explorers to misbehave while searching anythings. I will post in another blog for how to disable tracker-miner.