#612242 tracker: Really high CPU Usage and Memory Leak

Package:
tracker
Source:
tracker
Description:
metadata database, indexer and search tool
Submitter:
Deniz Akcal
Date:
2021-02-16 07:24:10 UTC
Severity:
important
#612242#5
Date:
2011-02-07 02:36:57 UTC
From:
To:
I was trying to figure out why my computer is super slow to the point that I have to do a hard reboot to have it useable again and I found the "tracker-store" process to use 90-100% CPU (I think when it
shouldn't be due to pausing or something) but more prominently I watch (with gnome-system-monitor) the memory increase from around 5MB to over 3GB! The uptime on the time before typing this was 16 minutes
and I had to kill the process so that my computer can be useable.

If more information is needed, just ask.

#612242#10
Date:
2011-02-07 02:47:20 UTC
From:
To:
severity 612242 important
thanks

How big is your home directory? How big is your tracker index (~/.cache/tracker)?
Does it help, if you tell tracker to nuke the existing db and restart fresh
(tracker-control -r). You might create a copy of ~/.cache/tracker and ~/.local/

Michael

#612242#17
Date:
2012-04-06 18:02:32 UTC
From:
To:
I have similar issues with tracker on a MacBook Pro (Core2 Duo CPU, 2GB
RAM, amd64 arch).  When the miner runs, it will use close to 100% of
both CPU cores.  More critically, there are memory leak problems.  When
I am not paying attention to the memory usage, the multitude of tracker
processes keep growing until there is 100% memory usage and I have to
halt the machine.

I just killed a bunch of zombie processes that in total were using over
1GB of RAM.

Home directory is ~100GB; the tracker index is ~500MB.

I have not yet tried nuking the DB because I don’t want to encourage it
to start rebuilding, since it makes the computer so unresponsive.  I’ll
try it overnight.

#612242#22
Date:
2012-04-12 16:44:10 UTC
From:
To:
Just wanted to update that I am seeing similar behaviour on an i386
system.  I just killed 24 zombie tracker processes 40 minutes after
booting the system; they were using a total of ~256MB of memory.

#612242#27
Date:
2012-04-16 00:31:09 UTC
From:
To:
Hello,

I experience similar problems, which started after upgrading to wheezy one or
two weeks ago.  The ~/.cache/tracker and ~/.local directories contained 1,2G
and 50M respectively.  I deleted them and within a few days they grew back to
1,1G and 37M.

Judging from the ouptut of the 'top' command, tracker did not exhaust memory
(2G, no swap) and CPU (dual 2.00GHz).  But the IO stress it puts on the machine
is enough to render it almost unusable, as for instance even the mouse pointer
is sometimes completely frozen.  Parallel daily cron jobs started at boot time,
for instance running apt-get updates, probably aggravate the IO stress a lot.

I am currently having tracker 0.14.0-2.

Cheers,

#612242#32
Date:
2012-06-17 23:16:22 UTC
From:
To:
Le Mon, Apr 16, 2012 at 09:31:09AM +0900, Charles Plessy a écrit :

Hello again,

on the same machine, I replaced my whole home directory by a fresh one.  This
solved the problem for a bit more than one month, but tracker came back
blocking my computer this morning.  Its version is now 0.14.1-1+b1.

The only solution I found for the moment is to purge tracker with dpkg --force.

Have a nice day,

#612242#37
Date:
2012-08-14 10:36:07 UTC
From:
To:
I had similar problems, which started after I changed my system from
i386 to amd64. I also had locale problems, because my .xsession
specified locales which I had not generated. After reconfiguring my
locales in a consistent way, the tracker problems disappeared.

Best, Simon

#612242#42
Date:
2013-07-20 03:46:38 UTC
From:
To:
Le Mon, Jun 18, 2012 at 08:16:22AM +0900, Charles Plessy a écrit :

Just for the record, I re-installed Debian (Wheezy) on the same machine after
replacing the mechanical hard drive with a solid-state disk, and I do not
observe any problem at the moment.  I can not tell if the key difference is the
absence of configuration cruft, the performance improvement, or the smaller
quantity of data on the drive.

Have a nice week-end,

#612242#47
Date:
2016-05-15 03:29:16 UTC
From:
To:
I experience this issue in the Jessie and reconfiguring locales does not
fix the issue. I tried removing all locales but one, but no avail. Any
ideas how I can work around the issue? Removing tracker's configuration
directories in .local and .cache did not help.

#612242#52
Date:
2016-11-22 21:07:27 UTC
From:
To:
I have problems like described here currenty with Testing on my Laptop.
Every late evening the collection starts, making the computer unusable
for around an hour (2 TB harddisk). Even the clock display then freezes
until the process is finished. How can I disable that?

DS

#612242#57
Date:
2017-01-29 16:34:12 UTC
From:
To:
single file (as listed in /tmp/tracker-extract-files.1000/) The same file
was listed there for several days and tracker-miner was using 100% of a
single CPU thread.

I do not think this is related to the original bug though the symptom is
similar. I'm not sure if I should add to this bug report or start a new
one. The problem file is not proprietary and I can submit it for testing if
that would be helpful.

This is on Debian 9, new install and running 1.10.3 version of tracker:
hbarta@yggdrasil:~$ apt policy "tracker*"
tracker-extract:
  Installed: 1.10.3-1
  Candidate: 1.10.3-1
  Version table:
 *** 1.10.3-1 500
        500 http://ftp.us.debian.org/debian stretch/main amd64 Packages
        100 /var/lib/dpkg/status
tracker-search-tool:
  Installed: (none)
  Candidate: (none)
  Version table:
tracker-gui:
  Installed: 1.10.3-1
  Candidate: 1.10.3-1
  Version table:
 *** 1.10.3-1 500
        500 http://ftp.us.debian.org/debian stretch/main amd64 Packages
        100 /var/lib/dpkg/status
tracker-miner-fs:
  Installed: 1.10.3-1
  Candidate: 1.10.3-1
  Version table:
 *** 1.10.3-1 500
        500 http://ftp.us.debian.org/debian stretch/main amd64 Packages
        100 /var/lib/dpkg/status
tracker-utils:
  Installed: (none)
  Candidate: (none)
  Version table:
tracker:
  Installed: 1.10.3-1
  Candidate: 1.10.3-1
  Version table:
 *** 1.10.3-1 500
        500 http://ftp.us.debian.org/debian stretch/main amd64 Packages
        100 /var/lib/dpkg/status
hbarta@yggdrasil:~$

Thanks!

#612242#62
Date:
2018-12-01 08:03:56 UTC
From:
To:
Was observing high CPU usage and memory leak after upgrading to Debian testing. And... lucky me, I found this bug report. Read through and decided to follow what others have done.

I removed the directories ~/.cache/tracker and ~/.local/share/tracker.
My computer was back to normal :)

#612242#69
Date:
2021-02-16 07:21:16 UTC
From:
To:
Workaround:

bartm@hostname:~$ cat /home/bartm/bin/cpulimit-autostart.sh
#!/bin/bash
set -e
cpulimit -q -b -l 40 -e tracker-extract
cpulimit -q -b -l 40 -e tracker-store
cpulimit -q -b -l 40 -e tracker-miner-fs
bartm@hostname:~$ cat /home/bartm/.config/autostart/cpulimit-autostart.desktop
[Desktop Entry]
Type=Application
Name=automatic start of cpulimit
NoDisplay=true
Exec=/home/bartm/bin/cpulimit-autostart.sh