Tracker Sucked The Life Out Of My System

I recently rebooted my desktop, only to find it painfully slow on restart. It took about 20 minutes of investigating to figure out what was going on, but finally I stumbled on the answer.

The first thing I noticed with top was that there were 10 instances of "identify" running, all using around 10% of the CPU.

If I killed all the instances of identify, they would immediately come back. It was driving me up the wall. With nothing else running on the desktop, these things would constantly pop up.

Finally I noticed that trackerd was the last process started. After killing it, the problem went away.

Tracker is a Linux search and indexing utility. One that I never use. Apparently it was trying to index the thousands of images I have stored on mounted NFS shares to a server.

Since my search utility of choice is "slocate", I uninstalled Tracker and the problem was solved.