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Bug 783869 - large tracker database causes nautilus plugin to freeze
large tracker database causes nautilus plugin to freeze
Status: RESOLVED OBSOLETE
Product: tracker
Classification: Core
Component: General
1.10.x
Other All
: Normal normal
: ---
Assigned To: tracker-general
tracker-general
Depends on:
Blocks:
 
 
Reported: 2017-06-16 18:29 UTC by Jason Crain
Modified: 2017-09-24 18:45 UTC
See Also:
GNOME target: ---
GNOME version: 3.21/3.22


Description Jason Crain 2017-06-16 18:29:26 UTC 
Forwarding from https://bugs.debian.org/861989.  Nautilus can sometimes freeze when right clicking on a file and selecting 'Properties'.

The issue is due to the nautilus tracker tags plugin.  The plugin attempts to contact tracker over D-Bus and will block the UI until it gets a response.  When nautilus is run with some debug environment variables set, the last few lines it prints before freezing are:

** (nautilus:26737): DEBUG: nautilus_files_view_notify_selection_changed:Selection changed in window 0x555555bb6530:                              
** (nautilus:26737): DEBUG:    file:///home/jason/Desktop                                                                                         
** (nautilus:26737): DEBUG: nautilus_file_get_icon: nautilus-file.c:5474: Called file_get_icon(), at size 16, force thumbnail 0                   
** (nautilus:26737): DEBUG: nautilus_file_get_icon: nautilus-file.c:5474: Called file_get_icon(), at size 48, force thumbnail 0                   
** (nautilus:26737): DEBUG: nautilus_file_get_thumbnail_icon: nautilus-file.c:5323: Modifying icon size to 64, as our cached thumbnail size is 64 
(nautilus:26737): Tracker-DEBUG: New TrackerTagsView with 1 files                                                                                 
(nautilus:26737): Tracker-DEBUG: tracker-backend.vala:37: Waiting for service to become available...                                                                 

It can wait for a long time if the tracker-store process is unresponsive, for example due to running an integrity check on a large database.  The original reporter experienced this problem with tracker 1.2.4 on Debian jessie/stable.  I can reproduce this with version 1.10.5 on Debian sid.
Comment 1 Debarshi Ray 2017-06-16 18:35:04 UTC 
The nautilus tracker tags plugin is unmaintained. I wrote it many years ago. The only solution is to get rid of it.
Comment 2 Carlos Garnacho 2017-06-16 19:17:28 UTC 
It will just go away on next release, there's plans to integrate the feature in Nautilus itself.

However, you are bound to have *something* waiting/blocking for a some time if tracker-store is autostarted (as it seems to be the case) and it's caught in a long integrity check.

I know nothing about your env, but early start of tracker-store should be handled by the systemd unit (not available in 1.2.x though, that's ancient...), and the process should be terminated with SIGTERM instead of killed abruptly.
Comment 3 Debarshi Ray 2017-09-24 18:45:29 UTC 
The nautilus plugin is now gone in 2.0.x.