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Last night, my Ubuntu 19.04 suddenly became unresponsive, then on and off for a while. The fan started spinning rapidly, as a sign that much work was being done inside. I managed to start a system monitor, and the memory usage looked quite disturbing:

Memory usage graph

As you can see, my RAM filled up rapidly, invoking my swap partition, until both were full, at which point all memory seemed to be released, starting a new RAM-filling cycle.

I managed to reboot the machine, only to discover that the RAM eating started immediately again.

A top showed me that the offending process was tracker-extract, which I managed to uninstall, and after another reboot, no more RAM eating.

As it turned out, I had removed Nautilus in the process. sudo apt install nautilus installed tracker-extract again, but it has behaved itself since then.

Is this a known problem? Can I see somewhere what went wrong, so that I can prevent it from happening again?

OZ1SEJ
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  • See if https://askubuntu.com/a/1138233/248158 helps. – DK Bose Aug 22 '19 at 10:57
  • Disabling tracker via Settings GUI doesn't work. `tracker daemon --kill` works, but then I have to do it manually after every boot, after waiting for a couple of minutes for a terminal, since my system responds so slowly when tracker is running. Isn't there a way of disabling tracker altogether? – OZ1SEJ Aug 23 '19 at 07:12

2 Answers2

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I am also having this problem. When I extract a certain archive, tracker-extract will almost immediately fill up all RAM and swap. Upon reboot, it will do it again after a few seconds. Only solution is to boot in maintenance mode and delete the extracted folder. I don't know what file is causing it, so it's hard to file a bug report.

user1014304
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After hours of frustration I just force removed the tracker package.

sudo dpkg --force-all -r tracker