[kde-linux] baloo_file_extractor - huge disk usage?

[Mark Knecht]

On Fri, Aug 14, 2015 at 10:24 AM, Mark Knecht <markknecht at gmail.com> wrote:
> 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.
>

So the 1 day test of disabling indexing in KDE System Settings failed,
although not nearly as badly as it had failed earlier. In this
incantation the machine essentially locked up for about 15-20 minutes
but eventually came back.

I've now rebuilt KDE with -symantec-desktop and done an emerge
--depclean to clean out the old stuff. The file indexing option is
gone from System Settings and there's no baloo left on the system
other than old config files. I'll give this setup a few days and see
how it goes. Hopefully it will be ok but if not I'll likely try some
other environment like xfce to determine if the root cause of this is
in KDE, Linux or maybe one of the Windows VMs running in Virtualbox.

Thanks for the help & ideas.

Cheers,
Mark