Fine-tune Tracker3 on Laptops

Today I learned: How to fine-tune Tracker3 on Laptops.

From the project’s page:

Tracker is an efficient search engine and distributed database for desktop, embedded and mobile. It is a middleware component aimed at desktop application developers who want their apps to browse and search user content.

Or in simple terms: Tracker enables GNOME users to easily search files (including their contents) on their system using the built-in search functionality.

Now this is all nice and works well enough, but sometimes the so-called miner processes, which mine for new files and update the metadata on record use quite some resources. And while in itself it is not that big of a problem on modern hardware, I do not want this to happen, while I am on battery power. This does not seem very “efficient” to me.

So I searched the Internet for possible solutions aside from disabling Tracker3 entirely and I found this answer which pointed me to the right solution for me. The answer suggests using the Dconf Editor which is available not only on Ubuntu but on every major Linux distribution and enables you to modify the dconf configuration database used by GNOME desktop environments.

I then decided to make the following adjustments to org.freedesktop.Tracker3.Miner.Files:

1. Set index-on-battery and index-on-battery-first-time to false. This prevents Tracker3 to run, when my system is on battery power.
2. Set throttle from 0 to 5 to decrease the indexing speed, which in turn should reduce the load on my system, even when plugged in.

In conclusion: I just made these settings, so time will tell, if they worked as intended. But for now I am happy with my findings and settings and they should solve my immmediate problem.