Global search at last

Posted Mar 23, 2024 19:37 UTC (Sat) by smoogen (subscriber, #97)
In reply to: Global search at last by swilmet
Parent article: GNOME 46 released

I believe beagle and some other search tools in the past have been 'defaults' in theory, but turned off in most distributions due to the users complaints about memory usage, cpu usage or slow speeds from disk reads.

Apple had a better story for this because the 'create some metadata' happened regularly when files are saved and they seem to have scaled out the searching to be 'good' enough for the CPU/memory the system had. [Controlling exact amounts of this means you can tune the database to what you know will work versus guessing how N! different hardware might work which GNOME and KDE have to do]

Global search at last

Posted Mar 24, 2024 3:52 UTC (Sun) by denials (subscriber, #3413) [Link]

Yeah, the first iterations of Tracker were not very nice to CPU usage, at least when it ran into my 500GB drive full of content in my home directory from which it had to build a search index from scratch. I think the use cases assumed a fresh install with user files being added incrementally, but the indexer processes happily consumed 99% of my CPU cores in their effort to race to the finish. I manually nice'd the indexing processes so that I could do my own work, then eventually just killed the Tracker daemon and told it to never start again.

But that was years ago. I run Fedora and have done fresh installs recently, and haven't noticed it bogging down any of my systems for a long time. However, others still run into similar issues, e.g. from August 2023: https://discussion.fedoraproject.org/t/tracker-miner-fs3-...

Global search at last

Posted Mar 25, 2024 12:35 UTC (Mon) by Wol (subscriber, #4433) [Link]

> I believe beagle and some other search tools in the past have been 'defaults' in theory, but turned off in most distributions due to the users complaints about memory usage, cpu usage or slow speeds from disk reads.

If it's anything like KDE/Baloo, I bet a lot of people just killed it and won't touch it now with a bargepole.

I guess it's many years now (my computer at the time was an AMD Athlon 1.4GHz), but I was forced to stop using KDE for a while, because the "login to full desktop" time was measured in days! I don't know how many because I never let it run to completion - I wanted to actually get some work done! For a desktop that's shut down every night, that's a no-no.

Cheers,
Wol