Disable tracker-store in Kali Linux

February 15, 2019 user Red Team 0

You may have noticed the tracker-store process running in the background on a Kali system, taking up a large amount of CPU time. This process indexes the contents of files.

up 15 min, top 1 user, Tasks: 202 total, 25.0 us, 3 running, 199 load average: 2.18, 2.03, 1.24 sleeping, O stopped, O zombie 0.3 sy, total, total, 0.0 ni, 3587.3 2046. o 74.7 id, 0.0 wa, 0.0 hi, 2272. 5502 . 0.0 si, 0.0 7 buff/cache 3 avail Mem st Mid mem MiB swap: 6818.6 2046. o PR 20 20 free, free, 958.6 used, 0.0 used. PID 22082 1085 USER root root o o VIRT 365416 4299696 RES 21400 424944 SHR 12308 108620 s R s ',CPU 27.2 11.9 'OMEM 0.3 6.1 TIME+ o:oo.82 2:57 .01 COMMAND tracker-store gnome-shell

Disabling tracker-store is non obvious, but can be done with the following commands:

echo "Hidden=true" >> /etc/xdg/autostart/tracker-extract.desktop
echo "Hidden=true" >> /etc/xdg/autostart/tracker-miner-fs.desktop
echo "Hidden=true" >> /etc/xdg/autostart/tracker-store.desktop
echo "Hidden=true" >> /etc/xdg/autostart/tracker-miner-apps.desktop

gsettings set org.freedesktop.Tracker.Miner.Files crawling-interval -2
gsettings set org.freedesktop.Tracker.Miner.Files enable-monitors false
tracker reset --hard

Once the system is rebooted, it should no longer be running in the background.