The Background Miner
Ubuntu (specifically versions using the GNOME desktop) includes a built-in search engine called Tracker Miner. This background service constantly crawls your hard drive, reading the metadata of your documents, photos, and music files to build a massive database. This database allows the GNOME search bar to instantly find files when you press the Super key. However, this constant background indexing can severely degrade system performance, especially on machines with slower mechanical hard drives or limited CPU cores. You might notice your disk usage hovering at 100% for hours while Tracker Miner automatically indexes a newly downloaded batch of files.
Disabling the Tracker Service
To reclaim your system resources and stop Ubuntu from automatically indexing your files in the background, you must disable the Tracker Miner services.
Since Tracker is deeply integrated into GNOME, simply uninstalling it can cause dependency issues. The safest method is to disable it per user. Open your terminal application (Ctrl+Alt+T). You will need to mask the systemd services that control the miner. Type the following command and press Enter: 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 (Note: The ‘-3’ denotes the version; depending on your Ubuntu release, it might be just ‘tracker-miner-fs.service’). Next, reset the existing database to free up disk space by typing tracker3 reset -s -r. After a reboot, the indexing service will be completely neutralized.