Recently, I noticed that my computer was grinding down to a halt sometimes. The CPU was not fully utilized, but there was a lot of disk activity. I noticed that a process ominously named tracker-miner-fs was the culprit.
This process seems to be one of the many that belong to Tracker, a part of the Ubuntu desktop. These set of tools run in the background and create metadata that is used by Ubuntu desktop applications.
tracker-miner-fs specifically seems to read all the files on disk and index their contents for context based search. I simply have no need of all these technologies and wanted to just make them go away.
To put an end to Tracker and its related tools, just uninstall it:
$ sudo apt remove tracker
$ sudo apt-get autoremoveTried with: Ubuntu 14.04