Comment 2 for bug 131983

(I'm not the original poster. I'm not going to do a clean install; I use my laptop for work and don't have time to reinstall from scratch).

I'm running Gutsy, and generally keeping up with updates. As soon as trackerd was installed, I noticed my system became unusable.

My laptop is a Core Duo 2GHz with 1GB RAM. Kernels 2.6.22-{7,8,9}.

The only way I can do any work is killall -STOP trackerd. I've got it set in "Indexing Preferences" to the slowest setting. I have free RAM, and the CPU is not particularly busy. The disk activity monitoring applet shows occasional but not constant activity, but the disk LED is constantly on.

Yet, the desktop is sometimes unusable, and always affected, while trackerd is running. Dragging a window may take up to 10 seconds before it moves. (I'm _not_ running the 3d window effects, by the way). Menus can take a second or two before appearing. Apps take 5-20 seconds to start, when before they'd be a second or two.

It feels exactly as though the system was swapping heavily, but it isn't swapping. Only 42MB of swap space is used, and that's probably due to entirely idle pages.

It's weird that this happens with free RAM, little CPU used, and little disk activity according to the applet - and not a lot of seeking sound from the disk, either, although the disk LED is always on.

I am guessing a kernel bug or scalability problem is involved. Something to do with VM or I/O scheduling. Perhaps made worse by the way trackerd spawns lots and lots of large processes, and the way they don't use O_NOATIME.

I have set "noatime" in the mount flags now. This improves desktop responsiveness enormously, but it is still noticably laggy, so I still do "killall -STOP trackerd" when I want to get some work done or start a new app.

It's taken about 4 days now, and still hasn't finished clobbering my laptop. Shouldn't it have stopped indexing by now?