Problems with baloo

neal

neal

I thought I'd give KDE a go since people seem to be putting a lot of effort into making it work, but at first I found it to be unusable. It would start off OK but soon it would become amazingly laggy and eventually it was impossible to even execute a command in a shell, even though the CPU load and the disc activity were both not that much.

After some research I found the problem to be baloo and after killing and disabling it everything seems to be working nicely now. It even seems to be faster than LXQT, the system I have been using for the last few years.

Is baloo known to be a problem, or should it actually work? I was all set on abandoning KDE for good as I had to reboot to get back to a usable system once it started running.
 
spinning rust or ssd ?
never used baloo but spotlight indexing may be a pain in the arse on macs with classic hdds
 
baloo just starts on it's own given the default configuration. Given how it can completely disable a system, I find it amazing that it's on by default.

Good old fashioned spinning rust here. The system disc is a single disc 2GB ZFS pool of it's own, but I have a zraid 5 disc pool of a somewhat larger capacity as well. It didn't seem to be looking at that though.
 
well if it spawns several threads and starts scanning structures like /usr/src and /usr/ports it will quickly make a hdd based system unresponsive
 
There is a control utility balooctl that might be useful in pinning down issues with search indexing, or if you don't need it, disable it entirely. Run balooctl help to see a list of supported options. Running balooctl disable will disable search indexing.

I don't remember the specifics, but baloo had caused headaches for many in the past, ranging from eating up resources to eventually dumping core.
 
I set up various KDE desktops over the years and disabling Baloo was always on the to-do-list, as well as removing other annoyances like Akonadi if preinstalled.

I don't understand why it's enabled by default either. Do most people forget where they store their files?
Plasma itself is reasonably lightweight but that kind of add-ons can make it feel as bloated as Ubuntu Desktop.
 
bsduck said:
I set up various KDE desktops over the years and disabling Baloo was always on the to-do-list, as well as removing other annoyances like Akonadi if preinstalled.

I don't understand why it's enabled by default either. Do most people forget where they store their files?
Plasma itself is reasonably lightweight but that kind of add-ons can make it feel as bloated as Ubuntu Desktop.
Click to expand...
Funny thing is: KDE is quite confusing about this, because you have the plasma search, that can address what baloo does, but there's baloo that creates a database (and do what the plasma search do), so there's akonadi... in the end you have a clusterf of things indexing here and there.
 
neal said:
Is baloo known to be a problem
Click to expand...

<https://www.freshports.org/sysutils/kf5-baloo/> ▶ bug icon ▶ 230726 – sysutils/kf5-baloo: freezes the system

That aside: ~/baloo_file.core is a norm for me, it appears soon after logging in, I never bothered reporting the bug so I disable the feature:

1620428657441.png
 
All my files are indexed on a fileserver, so I don't need any indexing in KDE/Plasma.
Best thing I did to improve the Plasma experience was balooctl disable.
 
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