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whale_steward
Asked: 2018-08-26 02:10:08 +0800 CST

Is it safe to disable baloo_file_extractor in KDE Plasma 5?

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Today after upgrading to Ubuntu 18.04, I found baloo_file_extractor consuming too much RAM and causing my laptop to slow down. I can temporarily fix this by running balooctl disable. I did a little googling and found out that it related to KDE which is weird I am using GNOME.

So is it safe to disable it or remove it altogether? If not, is there a way to make it not consume too much RAM?

18.04 baloo

2 Answers

  1. Best Answer

    It's safe to use balooctl disable.

    You need to be careful while installing software. Pay attention to what's being installed and to what's being pulled in by way of dependencies. For example, you may have installed dolphin, the file manager. That would pull in libkf5baloo5 and libkf5baloowidgets5 among other things. gwenview, an image viewer, would pull in libkf5baloo5.

    If you're interested in chasing things down, run apt rdepends libkf5baloo5 and apt rdepends libkf5baloowidgets5 and examine the output for software packages you may have on your system.

    Under normal circumstances in Kubuntu 18.04, which includes baloo by default, use of resources is minimal after the initial indexing process. RAM and CPU usage are not normally a concern. But there are reports of baloo running amok even on pure Kubuntu! I use it without problems for indexing both filenames and file contents.

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  2. i am using Ubuntu 20.04 Gnome, maybe it helps for others.

    i had this 100% cpu core problem with baloo_file and baloo_file_extractor processes. i don't know deeply but i saw that it was related with KDE environment.

    and i also installed dolphin for some reason before. so first i removed it from the system using "stacer" app. but problem has not gone. then i remove and purge dependencies with double check :) and problem solved!

    sudo apt-get autoremove dolphin
sudo apt-get autoremove --purge dolphin

    it is a bit disappointment that baloo core 100% usage since i really like KDE. after some observation i saw that baloo uses each core with some scheduling algorithm. at some certain time it uses let say core 1 with 100% and then after a couple of minutes goes to other core. maybe it is designed to maintainability but 100% is not acceptable. because it is over heated some certain part of cpu and fans getting started.

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