Comment 2 for bug 131094

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Jamie Lokier (jamie-shareable) wrote :

I have esd sound disabled, and performance is still incredibly slow when trackerd is running on a 2.6.22-{7,8,9} kernel. When I want to actually get some work done, I "killall -STOP trackerd".

The effect on desktop performance is weird: it feels exactly like heavy swapping. Menus etc. take seconds to appear. New apps take ages. Dragging a window can even take 10 seconds or more before it responds.

But there is free RAM, and especially there's plenty of reclaimable (i.e. not used by programs) RAM. I have 1GB.

It's not using much CPU either. (I have a Core Duo; neither core sees much usage while trackerd is running).

So it may be in some way dependent on I/O. But this is with the trackerd set to maximum throttling, i.e. slowest scanning.

Interestingly, the disk activity monitoring applet shows very little activity (little spikes every second or two), but the disk light is constantly on.

There's something else fishy: strace -p on the trackerd process shows expected system calls, but sometimes killing the strace prints "Process xxx detached" but then strace doesn't terminate, even with kill -9.