There’s plenty of posts about problems with tracker-miner-fs being a CPU hog, even if it’s theoretically “idle”. “tracker status” will say that indexing is complete, and all miners are idle, but that’s clearly a lie, and you process stuck running from bootup.

Most “solutions” on the internet revolve around just turning off tracker completely, or at least the filesystem miner. I don’t want that, I actually like having search work. What I wanted was it to, you know, work :)

So, while experimenting with resetting it, I noticed that it was always getting stuck trying to recurse a particular directory tree. It’s 6GB, but that was unlikely to be problem. However, one directory there contained a lot of files. Lots like, 600,000 files or so, in one directory. This is enough to make ls hang, so, maybe it was enough to make tracker-miner-fs hang too? (Side note, if you want to count files in a directory like this, find . | wc -l will work, where ls doesn’t.)

I didn’t actually need those files anymore, so I just deleted the suspect directories entirely, and then restarted the trackers with tracker daemon --stop; tracker daemon --kill; tracker daemon --start (The kill was to kill the errant tracker-miner-fs process, the others all stopped gracefully)

And presto, tracker status starts reporting sane and plausible results, the tracker-miner-fs runs at 100% for a short period, reporting status correctly, then the tracker extractor takes over. And we have search again!