Comment 16 for bug 153319

I found the database in ~/.cache/tracker, came back here to report what I found, and saw your (Jamie's) message. Thank you for the helpful information.

Before the earlier posting, I had never opened the Tracker Preferences dialog in my life. I never even knew it was there. Under "Indexing" in the "Files" tab, "Index mounted directories" is checked.

Anyway, I totally take it back about the database size being reasonable! Holy cow! Look at these file sizes!

    file-index.db: 1432714192
    file-meta.db: 3284840448

That's 4.7GB!

I have a symlink in my new home directory to my old home directory mounted read-only. The total size of my old home directory is ~2.5GB. The total size of my new home directory is negligible (pretty fresh install).

The total size of the other mounted filesystems, however, is *not* negligible: about 44GB of archived stuff (multiple machines, some stuff up to 10 years old). I don't have my backup drive in right now (500GB) but I just mounted a 300GB drive with 161GB of stuff on it -- thankfully trackerd isn't running -- good ole killall.

Given the awful gaffe in Nautilus (it thinks the mounted partitions in the two sides of my mounted raid mirror are separate unmounted partitions), it's not impossible that tracker is trying to index all the mounted RAID-based partitions twice too.

I've never used it, so I won't miss it, so I just uninstalled it. Maybe I'll give it a whirl later as you suggest.