If you have ever noticed your Ubuntu Linux machine’s hard drive constantly clicking or your CPU usage spiking when you are completely idle, the culprit is likely a background service called “Tracker” (or tracker-miner-fs). Tracker is Ubuntu’s built-in file indexing service. It constantly scans your home directory in the background to catalog your files, photos, and music so that you can search for them instantly using the GNOME application launcher.
While instant search results are a nice luxury, Tracker is infamous for being a severe resource hog, especially on older hard drives or machines with limited RAM. If you rarely use the global search feature and prefer to simply navigate your folders manually, you can completely disable this hidden indexing service to speed up your system.
How to Stop Tracker from Indexing Files
The safest way to disable Tracker is to mask the systemd services that control it. This prevents the daemon from ever starting, even if another application requests it.
- Open your terminal application (
Ctrl+Alt+T). - First, you need to execute a command as your current user (do not use
sudofor this step) to stop the currently running indexing processes:
tracker3 daemon -k
(Note: Depending on your version of Ubuntu, the command might just be tracker daemon -k).
- Next, you need to use
systemctlto mask the three primary Tracker services for your specific user account. Run the following three commands, one by one (again, without sudo):
systemctl --user mask tracker-store.service tracker-miner-fs.service tracker-miner-rss.service tracker-extract.service tracker-miner-apps.service tracker-writeback.service
(In newer versions of Ubuntu using GNOME 40+, the services are named slightly differently. Use this command instead:)
systemctl --user mask tracker-extract-3.service tracker-miner-fs-3.service tracker-miner-rss-3.service tracker-writeback-3.service tracker-xdg-portal-3.service tracker-miner-fs-control-3.service
What Are the Side Effects?
By masking these services, Tracker will never run again. Your CPU usage will drop, and your hard drive will stop spinning unnecessarily. The only downside is that if you press the Super (Windows) key and type the name of a deeply nested PDF document, the GNOME launcher will not be able to find it. You will have to open the file manager and search for the file manually.