Tracker imposes heavy cost on battery life and hard disk due to it’s intensive nature of indexing everything and thus constantly writing data to disk. You can check this with io-top. Also gvfs-metadata suddenly started using high cpu after I install tracker.
On battery with tracker (default configuration), my laptop (Dell XPS) only lasts 4 hour on moderate usage, without tracker it lasts more than 8 hours.
More from the bug comments:
First time I ran tracker never stopped indexing. I monitored tracker-miner-fs.log and also with (/usr/libexec/tracker-extract -v 2). At some point you would expect logging to stop when it becomes idle. But it didn’t. Only after tweaking and hard resetting situation improved dramatically.
I feel the default configuration is very bad. I changed following things and after that the situation is greatly improved.
-- enable-writeback false -- index-optical-discs false -- index-on-battery false -- index-removable-devices false -- ignored-directories ['core-dumps', 'CVS', 'lost+found', 'po', 'vendor'] -- ignore-stop-words true -- ignore-numbers true -- max-words-to-index 1000 -- removable-days-threshold 3 ? (I don't not understand this)
But now there won’t be any gui to configure this. Gnome is deprecating tracker-preferences. So we only have dconf-editor to configure.