One fine day I heard a laptop of mine making a sustained noise. I thought immediately of high CPU utilization. My intuition was right.
The issue was happening in Debian 11, running the Linux kernel 5.10.0-17-686-pae. Yeah, you’re right, it’s an i686 still functional machine. The issue began suddenly, but once it started remained happening for hours with no signs to stop.
I checked the processes using “top” and soon found the culprits. They were:
- tracker-miner-f
- tracker-extract
- tracker-store
I have never seen these guys before, so, I started browsing the web for advisory… I found a good match in the thread tracker-miner-f taking over 100% of cpu. First, I learned that tracker-miner-f is Gnome’s file indexer. I had no idea about it. Anyway, I searched for any systemctl command to disable it, and found none. OK… so, I continued reading and figured out to uninstall these packages:
- tracker-miner-fs
- tracker-extract
- tracker
but I noticed a removal of any of them (or all of them) would impact nautilus; so, I dismissed the idea of uninstalling them.
Then, I emptied the cache of tracker:
rm -f .cache/tracker/*
but the issue came back later.