[kde-linux] baloo_file_extractor - huge disk usage?

[Mark Knecht]

Hi Vojtěch.

On Thu, Aug 13, 2015 at 11:59 PM, Vojtěch Zeisek
<vojtech.zeisek at opensuse.org> wrote:
> Dne Čt 13. srpna 2015 14:36:35, Mark Knecht napsal(a):
>> Hi,
>>    I'm not sure if this is a Gentoo issue or a KDE issue so I'll start
>> on the KDE list. Thanks in advance.
>>
>>    I have a problem that's developed recently. The basic symptom is
>> the machine slows down horribly at some point in the afternoon with
>> the disk activity light is full on - no blinking at all. This results
>> in all applications - Virtualbox, Chrome, etc. - essentially ceasing
>> to operate correctly and KDE to sometimes locking up for 5-10 minutes.
>> Due to recent messages from Gentoo devs requiring baloo I've started
>> looking there.
>>
>>    When I'm in this state where disk activity appears to be 100% I see
>> large wait percentages in top. (3 CPUs in this state right now.)
>> Running iotop it appears that something called baloo_file_extractor is
>> spending 99.9% of its time waiting.
>
> There has been several bugs reported on that topic...
> https://bugs.kde.org/show_bug.cgi?id=349096
> https://bugs.kde.org/show_bug.cgi?id=233471
> https://bugs.kde.org/show_bug.cgi?id=333655
> https://bugs.kde.org/show_bug.cgi?id=332317
> https://bugs.kde.org/show_bug.cgi?id=333774
> Vojtěch

Wow, you've been dealing with this for a long time! (#333655) Sorry to
hear that.

Thanks for providing the links.

I Was wondering last night if some of my problem is due to the way
I've set up shared directories in Virtualbox. A number of directories
inside of Gentoo are seen as remote drives inside of my Windows VMs
allowing the VMs to share data with each other. A lot of my Baloo
problems seem to come in the afternoon, after the stock market closes
and the VMs are saving lots of stock price data to these directories.
I end up with 1000's of files rewritten every afternoon.

Anyway, I appreciate the response and am going down the path suggested
by Duncan, along with simply disabling indexing, assuming that option
work. We'll see over the next few days.

Cheers,
Mark