baloo_file, baloo_file_extractor in disk sleep

[Nikos Chantziaras]

On 24/04/14 16:31, Wolfgang Mader wrote:
> Whenever baloo is at work on my system, I see baloo_file and
> baloo_file_extractor in disk sleep state. This always leads to KDE GUI freeze.
> This was obvious worst when baloo was initially shuffling through all my
> files, but even now when baloo only needs to update newly changes files (I
> guess), the GUI hangs and the processes hit disk sleep. My disk is a
> traditional spinning rust one, no ssd, but the machine is fairly well powered.

The problem is not baloo itself, but the I/O scheduler of the Linux 
kernel. I have similar problems with my system. Not only with baloo (I 
disabled that now though), but with heavy disk I/O in general. If I copy 
a 5GB file for example, the GUI would freeze very often. The Linux 
kernel just doesn't seem good at keeping the GUI reactive (I suspect 
it's because it doesn't know what processes are part of the GUI.) Other 
OSes have it easier, I guess, since kernel and GUI are working together. 
Linux is not a unified system, so such things are probably way harder to 
develop in tandem.

I was able to improve things quite dramatically by patching my Linux 
kernel to use the BFQ I/O scheduler. Since I'm using Gentoo, this was 
quite easy; all I had to do is enable the "experimental" USE flag of the 
sys-kernel/gentoo-sources package and emerge it again. I then 
reconfigured the kernel (make menuconfig) and made the BFQ scheduler the 
default.

If you're not on Gentoo, this is going to be more difficult, as you will 
need to obtain kernel sources and patch the kernel manually with the BFQ 
patch.

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