And what everyone forgets ...

Where "distant past" for me was a few months ago when I switched to Wheezy and found something using most of the CPU and I/O bandwidth as it decided to index the heck out of my system as if it were the most important thing in the world. You might want to guess which program it was.

I remember loosely following the furore about Tracker and whether it was written appropriately. Having had some experience with database and indexing systems, there are situations where you just want to crunch the data as quickly as you can, and you get used to seeing big numbers in things like vmstat.

Quite how Tracker manages to tie up lots of resources while established data processing solutions generally do not might have something to do with a "perfect storm" of sub-optimally stored data - rather likely given the "scan the filesystem" nature of desktop search - and processor-intensive data extraction tools. Database and indexing systems tackle the former issue head on, of course, as I suspect Tracker also does once it has populated its index.

The solution is to dial down the aggressiveness of the indexing instead of assuming that the scheduler will keep things civilised. Sadly, I rather suspect that people have experienced Tracker's "warming up" period and have written off Debian and other distributions as a result.

Random Internet page showing that this isn't just me: http://forums.opensuse.org/english/get-technical-help-her...