I use my own home grown monitoring tools on my servers and they picked up something interesting. One of the checks my tools run is to look for processes that are growing in memory size, or are using more memory than I would expect.
They identified a couple of programs, baloo_file and tracker-store. A ps on processes containing tracker gave tracker-store, tracker-miner-fs and tracker-miner apps, so I thought I would see what they were.
Guess what, they are both file indexer programs. Why Gnome under F29 comes with two seperate file indexers I do not know, but it seems like a waste of CPU resources, and as I detected them when their running memory footprints raised warnings in my monitoring toolkit a waste of memory usage as well.
There documentation available for tracker at https://wiki.gnome.org/Projects/Tracker and it indicates that it is tightly tied to the gnome desktop so I have decided to leave that alone for now as it also had the smaller memory footprint.
The baloo documentation is at https://community.kde.org/Baloo and indicates it is used by the KDE plasma desktop.
I have both desktops installed and available via the logon session switcher menu as it took me a while to find a desktop that worked correctly with synergy so had to try quite a few. That may explain why both are installed, but annoyingly it means that reguardless of what desktop I chose both of them start running at user login.
I also do not know how usefull they are, as they are apparently used by applications that hook into them and have no direct command line interface to search (that I can see anyway) so a simple grep and my PDF text search utility are still more usefull to me than these indexers. They may be usefull to users that use file managers and are afraid of the command line however.
As baloo_file had the larger (by far) memory footprint that is the one I decided to get rid of, as I am not using the plasma desktop but the KDE fallback one. The result of that exercise is that you cannot get rid of it as it is tied to the installed plasma desktop. It is theoretically possible to disable it (although I have not rebooted to see if it stays disabled) using the following steps… on a per user basis as baloo is provided to index files under the users home directory and each user has there own configuration file. Fortunately on my machines I am the only user.
(1) vi $HOME/.config/baloofilerc and add to the end of the file the line
Indexing-Enabled=false
(2) stop and disable the baloo process using the balooctl commands as below
[mark@vmhost3 ~]$ balooctl status Baloo File Indexer is running Indexer state: Idle Indexed 273 / 273 files Current size of index is 32.33 MiB [mark@vmhost3 ~]$ balooctl stop [mark@vmhost3 ~]$ balooctl disable Disabling the File Indexer [mark@vmhost3 ~]$ balooctl status Baloo is currently disabled. To enable, please run balooctl enable [mark@vmhost3 ~]$
It is not possible to remove the baloo packages themselves as they are tied to the plasma desktop
[root@vmhost3 jobdata]# rpm -qa | grep -i baloo kf5-baloo-5.52.0-2.fc29.x86_64 kf5-baloo-file-5.52.0-2.fc29.x86_64 kf5-baloo-libs-5.52.0-2.fc29.x86_64 baloo-widgets-18.08.1-1.fc29.x86_64 baloo-libs-4.14.3-21.fc29.x86_64 [root@vmhost3 jobdata]# rpm -e kf5-baloo-5.52.0-2.fc29.x86_64 \ kf5-baloo-file-5.52.0-2.fc29.x86_64 \ kf5-baloo-libs-5.52.0-2.fc29.x86_64 \ baloo-widgets-18.08.1-1.fc29.x86_64 \ baloo-libs-4.14.3-21.fc29.x86_64 error: Failed dependencies: kf5-baloo is needed by (installed) plasma-workspace-5.13.5-1.fc29.x86_64 libKF5Baloo.so.5()(64bit) is needed by (installed) gwenview-1:18.04.3-1.fc29.x86_64 libKF5Baloo.so.5()(64bit) is needed by (installed) gwenview-libs-1:18.04.3-1.fc29.x86_64 libKF5Baloo.so.5()(64bit) is needed by (installed) dolphin-libs-18.08.1-1.fc29.x86_64 libKF5Baloo.so.5()(64bit) is needed by (installed) dolphin-18.08.1-1.fc29.x86_64 libKF5Baloo.so.5()(64bit) is needed by (installed) plasma-workspace-5.13.5-1.fc29.x86_64 libKF5Baloo.so.5()(64bit) is needed by (installed) plasma-desktop-5.13.5-1.fc29.x86_64 libKF5BalooWidgets.so.5()(64bit) is needed by (installed) dolphin-libs-18.08.1-1.fc29.x86_64 libKF5BalooWidgets.so.5()(64bit) is needed by (installed) dolphin-18.08.1-1.fc29.x86_64 libbaloopim.so.4()(64bit) is needed by (installed) knode-libs-4.14.10-38.fc29.x86_64
The tracker one I have left running for now as its memory footprint while enough to exceed my alerting threshold was tiny compared to baloo. So at some point I can get around to seeing if it is usefull, for now tracker-store has just been threshold adjusted up and added to my track memory growth monitoring to see if it is actually growing or is fairly static.
Update 18 June 2019, how to disable the tracker processes
To stop Tracker running on F30 (a list of services can be found with ‘ls /usr/lib/systemd/user/tracker*’)
Logged on as your own userid
cd ~/.config/autostart cp /etc/xdg/autostart/tracker*desktop . for FILE in $(ls tracker*); do echo "Hidden=true" >> $FILE; done systemctl --user disable tracker-store.service systemctl --user disable tracker-miner-fs.service systemctl --user stop tracker-miner-fs.service systemctl --user disable tracker-extract.service systemctl --user disable tracker-miner-rss.service systemctl --user disable tracker-writeback.service
reboot to confirm they are all stopped; ‘tracker reset -r’ to delete all existing indexes; check all are disabled
[mark@phoenix posts]$ tracker status Currently indexed: 0 files, 0 folders Remaining space on database partition: 44.1?GB (56.42%) All data miners are idle, indexing complete [mark@phoenix posts]$ tracker daemon Store: 18 Jun 2019, 09:27:05: 0% Store - Idle Miners: 18 Jun 2019, 09:27:05: ? RSS/ATOM Feeds - Not running or is a disabled plugin 18 Jun 2019, 09:27:05: ? File System - Not running or is a disabled plugin 18 Jun 2019, 09:27:05: ? Extractor - Not running or is a disabled plugin
