/usr/lib/tracker/tracker-store causes very heavy CPU load on Debian "Buster"

after having tracker-store running with almost 100% CPU, almost all the time for 7 days now, it seems like I found an easy fix:

tracker reset --hard

CAUTION: This process may irreversibly delete data.
Although most content indexed by Tracker can be safely reindexed, it can?t be assured that this is the case for all data. Be aware that you may be incurring in a data loss situation, proceed at your own risk.

Are you sure you want to proceed? [y|N]: 

/usr/lib/tracker/tracker-store process is gone, fan is spinning down, and everything is quiet after a week. After a reboot tracker-store still stays quiet.

tracker-store is part of tracker, a program that scans certain specified locations on your hard drive (and other places like your emails) and indexes the contents into a database. This allows you to do fast file contents searches. Whereas, tracker-miner-* are programs that scan data and tracker-store is the program that stores the metadata in a database for fast access later. Tracker uses a database for its own purposes, so it makes sense that it can use your CPU even when you are not dealing with process.

You could also configure tracker to index nothing (see program tracker-preferences), thereby probably stopping it from doing any work at all. Or you could try removing the package entirely, but, this will most likely break your system (more details - thanks to @broman). And also check this post How do I disable tracker in GNOME?.

Source :

blogs.gnome.org/mr/2009/09/18/tracker-update-2
What is a tracker? - gnome

Some tracker miners get hung up on content they don't understand. If tracker daemon -f isn't showing any updates but tracker-extract is still hogging the CPU, maybe take a look in /tmp/tracker-extract-files.*. If the same symlink sits around there for any length of time, it's crashed the miner process. It's important to remove that file from anywhere that tracker will find it, as otherwise it'll crash again.

(a summary of my response originally here: no progress updates from gnome tracker)