baloo_file_extractor is slowing me down.

[Duncan]

Christian Dysthe posted on Wed, 20 Dec 2017 16:33:40 +0000 as excerpted:

> Hi,
> 
> I am running KDE Neon user edition. Recently I have noticed that my
> laptop has been slow and sluggish. I have found baloo_file_extractor to
> be the culprit. After a while is consumes 4 GB or RAM and between 50 and
> 100% of my CPU. As soon as I kill the process my laptop speeds up again.
> I'm not sure exactly when this started but it has been during the last
> couple of months. I have noticed I have a very large ~/.xsession-errors
> file with a lot of baloo references in it. I find a lot of this:
> 
> org.kde.baloo: Found removable storage volume for Baloo undocking:
> "/org/kde/solid/udev/sys/devices/pci0000:00/0000:00:14.0/
usb1/1-10/1-10:1.0/0003:1FD2:6007.0008/input/input22/mouse2"
> 
> org.kde.baloo: Found removable storage volume for Baloo undocking:
> "/org/kde/solid/udev/sys/devices/pci0000:00/0000:00:14.0/
usb1/1-10/1-10:1.0/0003:1FD2:6007.0008/input/input22/event9"
> 
> org.kde.baloo: Found removable storage volume for Baloo undocking:
> "/org/kde/solid/udev/sys/devices/pci0000:00/0000:00:14.0/
usb1/1-10/1-10:1.0/0003:1FD2:6007.0008/input/input22"
> 
> 
> but not sure if that is relevant. How can I find out what is causing
> this and possibly get baloo to behave like it did in the past? I've been
> poking around in forums and found that baloo can be a problem at times,
> but not a way to troubleshoot it. Mostly it seems like people disable it
> which I do not want to do since I use file search a lot.

Welcome to the love/hate relationship of file indexing services. =:^(

FWIW, I not only disabled baloo at runtime, I'm on gentoo which makes it 
possible, so I build kde components without it where possible, and use 
alternatives where it (and akonadi) would be required -- no kdepim 
related stuff here.  For me, the benefits simply aren't worth the 
headaches, and I use other tools like mc's text search, grep, and the 
package-manager's tools, when I need to search.  (No locate service 
running here for similar reasons, but I'm on ssds so live-grep/search 
isn't /that/ slow.)

But your machine, your call, and you find it useful, so...

Because I have it build-time disabled I can't verify current behavior, 
but IIRC, check kde/plasma system settings, find the baloo control panel 
applet, and set the paths it indexes so it won't try to index removable 
storage.  Depending on how you use removable storage, indexing it may 
well create gigabytes of garbage index data that's of limited or no use 
anyway, and limiting indexing to only those parts of permanently 
accessible storage where it's useful, should let it index that while 
keeping the index relatively small and fast.  Further, because it's 
permanently accessible, full-indexing it should happen only once, and 
after that, it'll only have to keep up with changes, which should be must 
faster.

But the key is limiting what it indexes to stuff that's actually going to 
be useful to you.  The more stuff it indexes the bigger, slower, and less 
efficient it gets, but obviously, if you don't have it indexing much at 
all, there's a point at which you might as well not run it at all, so 
it's finding that balance that brings the magic.

Tho as I said, for me, that balance is "kill it with fire!", for you it's 
obviously different, and that's fine.  You just have to /find/ it.

-- 
Duncan - List replies preferred.   No HTML msgs.
"Every nonfree program has a lord, a master --
and if you use the program, he is your master."  Richard Stallman