trackerd keeps trashing the hard drive incessantly, gives almost no status info

[Bogdan Butnaru]

Binary package hint: tracker

Hello. I have Ubuntu Gutsy installed since a long time ago on a work computer (and a couple at home).

Today I got really annoyed by the fact that during the last month or so I can't remember a single moment when trackerd wasn't trashing the drive madly. I have tried all settings from quickest to slowest, I leave my computers running during the night, but it's still running all the time.

It's actually annoyingly _loud_, even with acoustic management turned up to "quiet". It also makes things run a bit slower all the time; not as much as you'd expect from seeing the hard-drive load applet turned all the way up, but still noticeable. (Things run visibly better when I kill trackerd.)

The worst part of this is that trackerd doesn't report _anything_ about why it's taking up all available IO. "tracker-status" (which wasn't even installed by default) only tells me "it's indexing". "tracker-stats" tells me something like "Files : 210463", which I don't even know what it means. I suppose it's "files indexed", but it could be anything else; what's worse, it doesn't seem to change very much, despite the fact that the drive keeps grinding away.

It really needs at least a tiny applet (even a command line tool) to tell users exactly how much work did it do, how long did it took, _and_ how much more there is to do, _and_ an estimate of how long it will take, however inaccurate. A progress bar (that's obviously working) would make it much easier to tolerate it.

[Bogdan Butnaru (bogdanb)]

How is this fixed? Is there a new status panel that was added recently?

[Jamie McCracken (jamiemcc-blueyonder)]

we have a tracker status icon app which shows progress bar, status and allows you to pause indexing as well as view statistics and of course perform searches. The icon also animates when indexing

its in svn and will be in the soon to be released 0.6.4 version of tracker