Expose toggle in ‘Settings’ for ‘LOW | MED | HIGH’ priority [low by default?]
Only run when connected to AC power [never on battery?]
Make sure bin file is named appropriately for easy discovery by ‘average/newb’ sys-admin when viewing in Sys-Mon apps of process trees. Die/HUP gracefully for test purposes when it is suspected of impacting performance. [uninstallable at any time?]
P.S. Windows 10 has a background indexer called: “Windows Search” and a ‘preload’ type service called “Superfetch” that peg the hard drive at 100% usage when booting and for quite some time afterwards in the user session. Annoying as heck when using in a gnome-boxes session for that occasional Windows requirement. Let’s do better !!
It’s very useful and necessary in my opinion, but I experienced CPU and disk I/O performance lose, badly, like system hanged. I let tracker-store and tracker-extract work about 6 hours, but wasn’t enough and they didn’t finish! (using fresh artful x64)
No need to explain anymore, since above replays are enough.
I'm a developer and use "-j8" for compilation, and need maximum CPU performance, then I prefer no indexing.
So, my recommendation is, "No" default installation
I installed tracker yesterday. After an initial spike in CPU and Disk I/O because of indexing (which didn’t take that long at all), I have not experienced any drawbacks. Using Ubuntu 17.10 on an XPS 13 9360.
I am using 17.10 (now with Gnome) upgraded over many versions, I don’t know when tracker got installed. It seems to causes no problems on my system and I find the search from the Dash (or whatever it is called in Gnome) useful. I miss the flexibility of setup with tracker-gui which was there on 17.04.
Apparently, I’ve had tracker installed for a while on 17.10. (set to automatically installed, so it must’ve been a dependency of something…) Haven’t had any issues with 17.10 (except from Wayland bugs), so +1 for installing it by default!
Also important: including tracker opens up the road to include Gnome Photos. I think it’s a lot better than shotwell, and it’s receiving many improvements: http://www.uajain.com/GNOME-Photos-happenings/
The feedback here seems to have been mostly good but showed that some users are hitting bugs. In any case such changes are risky in a LTS cycle and it’s getting late in the cycle now/other work still didn’t land. Let’s discuss that at the weekly meeting tomorrow but I suggest we do the change next cycle postLTS, it should give us plenty of room for testing without putting the LTS at risk.