tracker stops indexing, 100% cpu load

[Łukasz Góralczyk]

Binary package hint: tracker

Tracker seems to index files but every thousand, or so, file it stops (looking at the information from tracker-applet) and loads CPU to 100%. Looking at the logs in ~/.local/share/tracker/tracker.indexer.log it shows many lines like this:
"... Tracker-Warning **: Could not store word 'SOMEWORDHERE': with fatal error"
and they are keep coming (it seems like this loads the CPU).

After a reboot indexing seems to go further (like problematic file was omitted).

Someone has posted similar problem on tracker list: http://<email address hidden>/msg04660.html

Software versions:
tracker version 0.6.91
Ubuntu 9.04

[Mikael Nilsson (mini)]

I can confirm this exact behaviour on an up-to-date jaunty.

In addition, the log file is being truncated every couple of seconds.

[Jeremy von Hoff (jvonhoff)]

Confirming & subscribing. This is an irritating one.

[cyxapeff (cyxapeff)]

I have this problem too.

[Matthias Metzger (macellarius)]

I agree. Please fix it.

[Jason Harman (apollyon-direct)]

Ditto:

Confirming & subscribing. This is an irritating one.

Any information required I will post here post haste :)

[Krešo Kunjas (deresh)]

same problem here. there seems to be a new release of tracker that should fix this issues:

http://mail.gnome.org/archives/tracker-list/2009-March/msg00078.html

[Michael Griffith (michaelallangriffith)]

One workaround:

1) rm /home/<username>/.cache/tracker/*
2) restart tracker indexer by killing the tracker-indexer process and restarting. You can restart the daemon by right clicking on the tracker icon (magnifying glass) and choosing "Indexer Preferences". The "Enable Indexing" check box will notice that the daemon has been killed and offer to restart it for you. If this step seems too complicated, just reboot instead.

[Ka-Hing Cheung (kahing)]

According to a very similar upstream bug report, this is still happening with 0.6.92

[aldebx (aldebx)]

I still experience this exact problem even after having issued a "reindex" and having completely deleted folders .local/share/tracker and .config/tracker

It appears to be 0.6.91 version that is causing database corruption.

Also it is going to flood my home directory with an increasingly huge tracker-indexer.log

I had to remove tracker now.

Please fix this issue fast! It's clearly a showstopping bug that prevents users from even using the program, if not only stressing without reason the machine.

[Matthias Metzger (macellarius)]

workaround worked for me, thx.
Though, his step wasn't available for me: The "Enable Indexing" check box will notice that the daemon has been killed and offer to restart it for you.
But I manually started indexing from the menu.

[aldebx (aldebx)]

I confirm removing .cache/tracker/ fixed the problem. How many folders does tracker use!

[Jorge Gustavo (jgr)]

Hi,

The bug was annoying.
I've solved it, doing:
i) Removing ~/.cache/tracker
ii) killing the process
iii) removing it, ie, sudo apt-get remove libdeskbar-tracker tracker tracker-search-tool
Sorry, but I don't know how useful tracker is.
I use 'locate' to find files on the file system.

Regards,

Jorge

[Paul Piscuc (paul.piscuc)]

Jorge Gustavo's solution worked on an up-to-date Jaunty Ubuntu.

[aldebx (aldebx)]

removing tracker itself of course fixes the symptom... but is not the solution!
It would be like removing your stomach simply because you have a stomach ache!

By the way deleting ~/.cache/tracker is the actual workaroud.

locate is useful, but not an alternative to tracker. Locate is simply a filename search tool, while tracker is much more:
- search your emails
- search your files sorting them according their types (images, ODT, PDFs...)
- search inside your file contents all at once.

E.g. it enables you to find your Ratatouille receipt despite its filename being aunt-rata.txt

[Martyn Russell (martyn-lanedo)]

We think this is now fixed upstream. Possibly in release 0.6.92. Basically, the sooner QDBM is terminated from Tracker, the sooner we stop getting these silly issues and warnings.

[pt123 (pt123)]

I had to also delete the ~/.local/share/tracker/data folder before that I was getting this error
Starting log:
  File:'/home/par/.local/share/tracker/trackerd.log'

(trackerd:6050): Tracker-CRITICAL **: Field 'Image:HasKeywords' doesn't have a valid data type 'Integer'

(trackerd:6050): Tracker-WARNING **: Error loading query:'sqlite-fulltext.sql' #0, Cannot use virtual tables in shared-cache mode

(trackerd:6050): Tracker-WARNING **: Error loading query:'sqlite-fulltext.sql' #0, Cannot use virtual tables in shared-cache mode

[Martyn Russell (martyn-lanedo)]

Hi pt123, the first error shouldn't happen, the second and third are expected - we don't use that .sql file anyway so it is just a warning about something unused at this point. I will be fixed when SQLite FTS is used.

[Nils (loewen-nils)]

I'm running Tracker 0.6.92 and this is still happening after bringing Jaunty to the most recent update status (4/5/09 9:13 AM pacific time). It affects both my 64 bit Jaunty on my T61 and my wife's 32 bit on a core solo compaq laptop.
Both laptops get so hot, you cannot put them on your lap anymore. I thought my fan was gone... My wife noticed it first because everything gets quite slow on the core solo but since I have a core 2 duo CPU it only freezes one.

[gronbaek (gronbaek)]

I can confirm this bug with 0.6.92 as well. ~/.local/share/tracker/tracker-indexer.log fills up with the "could not store *someword*" message.

[Łukasz Góralczyk (lukasz-goralczyk)]

Problem's gone for me (I hope). I've upgraded to tracker version 0.6.92 - more than 1/3 of files were indexed and there are no messages about words not being processed. I'm not sure, but before upgrade I've removed all things related to tracker.

[Andres Mujica (andres.mujica)]

Hi, i' m marking this as dupe from bug #346912.

Thanks for the tips and the upstream bug report.

[Wolfgang (wt-lists)]

Hi,

I can not confirm, that the new tracker version 0.6.92-1ubuntu2 fixed the problem:
- CPU stays at 100% forever
- after increasing the log level I see that the is log full with "Tracker-Warning **: Could not store word 'SOMEWORDHERE': with fatal error"
- tracker statistics show "0" files

What helped, though, was to remove ~/.cache/tracker

Maybe the "broken" cache directory could be deleted at first run after package update?

Or if that's not possible the "Build new index" function (like in tracker applet) could delete the cache directory first. I think that would solve the problem for most users without having them to google around and then delete the files manually...

[Antoni Aloy (antoni-aloy-gmail)]

I can confirm also the bug on the last updated version and on Linux G5 PPC distribution.

[Christian (tschanzc)]

I never had this problem with jaunty beta but after I updated today, I also got the problem. I removed the cache as described here and the 100% CPU load is gone.
I needed a couple of tries at re-indexing until it actually worked... (At first only showed "indexing 0 of 0")