tracker needs some serious love ...

I remember reading a lot of posts/emails etc from the author of tracker awhile back that was badmouthing beagle and extolling the virtues of tracker. I've been using tracker on one of my fedora 12 boxes for a week now, and all it does is chew cpu and ignore my preference settings (and crash all day long). Just now, I had the setting which says to pause indexing when the computer is busy, and trackerd was using 99% of one of my cores. I decided to strace this to see what it was doing:

strace -p -o /tmp/trackerd_strace.out

I let it run for about 30 seconds, and then go to /tmp to try and tail -f the file a bit. However, when I get there, there are 81,000 files from this afternoon matching the pattern tracker-evolution-module-* all from this afternoon. Yikes. I kill trackerd and vim the trackerd_strace.out file, and what does it contain? It contains 2,500,000 lines of this:

poll([{fd=4, events=POLLIN}, {fd=3, events=POLLIN}, {fd=6, events=POLLIN}, {fd=9, events=POLLIN}, {fd=7, events=POLLIN}], 5, 0) = 0 (Timeout)

I used to be a big beagle fan, but it looks like it's basically unmaintained right now, so I switched over to tracker. Since I've done that I get about 20 - 30 trackerd crashes a day (per abrt) and this constant cpu usage. I think I'm going to have disable tracker and go back to beagle, or start using google desktop again.