mediascanner consumes a lot of cpu for a long time

This should be fixed with latest media stack, can you still reproduce?

I am on trust at this moment, and mediascanner-service is take up a lot of cpu, somewhere around 90-100% on 1 core.

What I noticed was that mediascanner-service ran over all the directories in ~, then a new process came up and did the same. This is on trusty (2013-11-14) on a laptop. Easy to see if you tail -f .cache/upstart/mediascanner.log

Same problem here in Trusty.

Can I somehow give mediascanner hints where it should NOT search for music? I have folders in my home folder which contain a whole linux dist in source code and stuff ... and it takes ages for mediascanner-service to scan that stuff. And while it scans, min. one CPU is 100% used but with a second mediascanner process it will eat my cpu :( ....

Please either let me configure which folder it should scan or not scan, or set the nice value of the process to something that it is irrelevant for the normal work.

Cheers
Ephraim

I have the same issue as Ephraim. I have a drive attached with 100s of GBs of backups, and as soon as I log in mediascanner starts trying to scan it all. I had to remove the executable bit from the process so I could kill it without it resuming.

I seem to have the same problem on trusty. mediascanner-service is always using around 100% CPU (4 cores), and my laptop battery only lasts 1.5 hours instead of the normal 6. When I kill the process a new one is created immediately, and I cannot find the package to which the mediascanner-service belongs.

In the logs I see it is scanning all the sources (qt5!) in my ~/Download. There should be a way to restrict the directories where it searches and to disable mediascanner completely.

mhr3, I am on trusty and dist-upgrade every week. The problem is still there.

It seems to scan all the external backup harddisc - when it's connected it keeps running.
Please implement/document how to configure it to exclude certain areas of the system.

otherwise I will have to remove it from my installations.

+1

The same situation (on 14.10): It runs with 100% CPU as soon as I connect a backup drive (déjàdup) or a phone (to sync music to the phone, not to index the phone!). Scanning local files may have a benefit, but I don't think scanning any external device without user's intention is acceptable at that cost. Until this issue is fixed, it would better not be part of a stable Ubuntu release.

In 14.10 it appears my whole file system becomes very slow when it is running. Quit obvious impact on my apt-get speed.