Public bug reported:
Binary package hint: tracker
Related to bug #130935 (indexing takes a very long time, no idea of
progress, disk needed or time left), bug #131983 (kills desktop
performance while running), and bug #131094 (more on kills desktop
performance while running), and bug #130794 (kills battery on laptops),
I think Tracker indexing should be disabled by default, even when
running on mains power, until these problems are solved.
I'm running Gutsy and generally keeping up to date. As soon as Tracker
was installed automatically by Update Manager, I noticed my desktop was
completely unusable. Dragging windows, menus, starting apps, even
sometimes the shell prompt, all were unusuably slow. We are taking
10-20 seconds delay for things to respond to the mouse.
This is on a quite capable laptop: Core Duo 2GHz with 1GB RAM, and
curiously, not much CPU used, free RAM, and little disk activity shown.
I set Indexing Preferences to the slowest setting.
After a while I realised that setting "noatime" in /etc/fstab made a
huge difference, but still noticably harming desktop usability. So I do
"killall -STOP trackerd" when I need to do some work, and start it again
to continue giving it a chance to index.
After a few days, I find it's going to take longer than I hoped. This
wouldn't be a problem if it didn't affect performance, but currently it
has a big effect so it's a problem.
I also find, after a few days, that my disk is full with Tracker's
index, currently 3.1GB for a 72GB home directory index, and that's not a
finished index: the disk is full. When I free up some space, Tracker
fills it up by doing some more indexing. I have no idea how much space
in total will be used.
After every boot, it scans the home directory again of course. With
662,000 files in mine, this is quite a long time and even if it's just
stat() to validate its index. (The Tracker folks know that a better
kernel mechanism would fix this, and I have discussed it on linux-kernel
years ago, alas back when the filesystem maintainers didn't see any
point...)
With all these things together, even though it might be a useful feature
when it works, currently Tracker is actively harmful on my system and
probably many others. Therefore its default settings should be to
disable it until explicitly activated by the user, or some other way to
ensure the default settings won't break an otherwise working desktop
system. Perhaps it could bring up a dialog warning that it's
experimental and may harm system performance, and how to disable it,
when asking whether to enable it the first time. Or just not install it
until requested by the user.
It has been suggested that GNOME apps may come to depend on Tracker. I
suggest that for now, the technology isn't ready.
It makes my laptop (and reportedly a few others) nearly unusable, and
usable only because I know workarounds. No other update in Dapper,
Edgy, Feisty or Gutsy has had such a major effect on usability for me.
Thanks
** Affects: tracker (Ubuntu)
Importance: Undecided
Status: New
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Tracker should not be enabled by default until it doesn't clobber everything
https://bugs.launchpad.net/bugs/132741
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