KDE is Slow !?! | Disable Baloo File Indexer

49 thoughts on “KDE is Slow !?! | Disable Baloo File Indexer”

1. Clear index: balooctl6 purge

2. KDE's file indexing is one of its greatest features and extremely useful. Also, it is KDE: Just turn it off in the GUI if you must.

3. thank you, i was finally able to disable him

4. I only needed to know: this is KDE's… So perhaps we should punish KDE and use something else until they correct the KDE slow dialog.

5. Too much chatty chat before getting to the point

6. jungle book!

7. Sir my desktop disappeared and I can neither remove nor open any file. What can i do ??

8. in kubuntu 20.04, is it "krunner"?

9. I prefer balooctl config set contentIndexing no , because then, I can still search file names.

10. Installed kde neon today and disappointed it eats 1.4gb of ram without any application open .
    All tech channels lied that kde is like XFCE

11. OMG ! "Has Microsoft Taken Over Linux "? …………..So Freaking Hilarious ! ha ha ha ha

12. KDE on Manjaro feels cool!

13. OMG this is so helpful

14. @Chris
    balooctl stop is not a valid command anymore. Stop has been integrated to disable.

15. All right, I thought that Chris blew this up too much back then but I reconsidered. Today I checked my CPU-load to see how much CPU-load playing some video gives, I noticed that baloo file extractor was running at 5 to 6% and I regularly noticed a lag while typing in Telegram. I noticed that lag before but I didn't know the cause. Then I saw spikes of over 300 MB/s disc write. That explains it. It is not the CPU-load, it is the I/O. With the SSD being loaded that much it is as if you have a hard drive. Chris, you were correct. As handy as Krunner is, it is not worth the price. Exit Baloo.

16. Thanks alot…this service was
    making me start to miss Windows

17. disabling through this or from the "file search" on system settings, it had solved an issue where my Manjaro KDE would not suspend, and would also get stuck and ramp up my CPU fan

18. Even though i figured it out myself before watching this video, i really appreciate this video, i'm sure it gonna be useful for a lot of KDE users!

19. thanks a lot!

20. i had this + some weird thumbnailer that gobbled all RAM. It used 2-3GBs of RAM per thread, some of them crashed because of low memory, others continued and took over swap aswell.. I forgot the process name, just know that it is related to icoutils somehow.

21. The indexing stinks for some people on all LInux desktops if they have rather a lot of files about. It can be controlled from system settings via the search icon. I've just moved from 42.2 to 15.1 and at least it doesn't default to indexing content as well as it did some time ago. I've not tried messing with it yet but one option may be to use the do not search section and add /home and maybe /media. Not much point in indexing tmp's either. Being able to find system config files can be useful at times. I can never remember where they are.
    There is a need to be careful if any gnome apps are added – that may bring in their file indexer. If that happens best to block install from YAST so it wont happen again. Some Gnome apps wont work without it.
    Some people make a lot of use of the plasma search options. For instance type alt with f1 which brings up the start menu. Type some parts of an app's name and at some point use arrows to select and press return. KDE defaults to all of plasma search options being active. Suites keyboard warriors. 😉 I use a mouse a lot. There is a desktop graphic available for it as well – can't remember the name off hand and may have changed anyway.
    SpaceFM includes a file searcher. People may find that dolphin search is rather slow without the index. I don't think it generates an index – didn't on my last install.
    Curiously Linux also has an indexer called locate. It's database is updated manually via a specific command. This means it wont find newly added files until the database is updated. Going back to KDE 2 and 3 and Kfind could be set to make use of it. It was very very quick. 🙂 Mind you drive sizes are much larger now than they used to be.

22. thanks a lot!

23. I will keep harping. Fedora 29 with Cinnamon desktop is the way to go. Period. IMHO, KDE has become the Windows 10 of Linux desktops.

24. I hated the indexer in windows and sad to see KDE picked up on the same system slowdown approach.

25. Frightening ….
    but thanks – good to know

26. I Love Cinnamon Of Linux Mint

27. Disable akonadi also.

28. The first thing i do whenever installing a distro with KDE. I didn't know about it by the first time i tested KDE so i thought it was a very slow/bloated DE but in fact it's lightweight and fast, just baloo ruins it.

29. On my 10 yo machine with the latest Plasma, baloo-file takes 1.5 mb of RAM.

30. A handful of developers are trying to make a fork of LXDE called LXQt. I know that is super old news. Allegedly, LXQt is now at version 0.14, but I have not found any new isos yet offering that. Allegely Lubuntu 19.04 has it. It seems like it would make more sense to fork the current version of Plasma 5.14.90, and trim it down to make a DE called – Plasma-lite. The problem I see with both ideologies, is that once you open Firefox, you are going to be at or over 1 GB anyways, so you are still going to need a computer with at least 2 GB of RAM just to be functional. Seems like a whole lot of work for nothing. But then again, I am not trying to run Linux on a toaster oven, or Raspberry Pi. Another problem I see with LXQt is they have not even begun to work on a wayland session. Right ? And wayland is now at version 1.17. I am not a developer and never will be, but I would think their time is too precious to waste. I hope to try a good LXQt distro. So far the ones that I have tried are lame. I am in Fedora Rawhide LXQt, and it is the lamest of the bunch, but is rockin the 5.0.0-rc4 kernel, and all the latest Mesa graphics.

31. But why aren't there more chrome processes running? :/

32. got commands for a non-systemd distro? not that i need it, but it'd be good to add.

33. same problem this is why I have the system load widget near my clock in the system tray.
    Every time I saw 100% cpu usage in a single core… something wrong is going on.

34. Must have been the influence of "Windows," Gnome has "tracker data": https://wiki.gnome.org/Projects/Tracker/Documentation/GettingStarted Nasty stuff, so you can do a lazy search. You don't know where your documents are? We all pay for your disorganization.

35. indexing does nothing but takes up resources. (ehm, windows)

    wait! That's Terminator, I have it on all my Linux rigs. I love it.

36. Here as a GNOME user to laugh at KDE slowing down

37. Did you ever tried deepin, Sir

38. It feels slow to me as well, until I replace kwin with (performance patched) mutter or muffin window managers. 😀
    Kwin doesn't really like my NVIDIA card, either tearing or sluggish af.
    Martin Graesslin (main developer of kwin) doesn't like NVIDIA as well, so there's the culprit I think

    I just stay with Gnome, activities are fun to use and I miss them in every other desktop environment and even Windows 10 lol

39. Do you actually use 45gb of Swap :)?

40. Baloo is configurable (you can disable certain locations that change files too often from indexing) and on occasions, it can go wild and slow down the computer. It often happens on new installs or when messing with huge amount of files. On average user systems it rarely causes issues but nevertheless, it does sometimes.
    If the baloo database is corrupted you can delete it and let baloo re-start indexing again. It may take even a few hours but if everything is correct, baloo should take a rest and not interfere with the system much. In the correct situation, it's barely visible and it's harmless.
    Still, baloo is known offender and had many bugs that were fixed but obviously, it's still far from being perfect. It would be good to gather the data and file a bug report. Disabling baloo will elevate your problems but won't improve baloo for others that don't mind it. Actually, baloo is fine until it starts its shenanigans…
    Too bad that you didn't show up other ways of configuring baloo. Disabling it is not always an optimal option for all.

    On my system, baloo runs and is fine. I had few times issues with it but eventually, they were resolved, so instead of giving up on certain functionality, I endured and still have it, just in case. But I do admit that it's rarely used functionality…

41. Thanks for the great vids Chris. Call me a pedant… but it's Plasma, not KDE. KDE is the organisation that creates the Plasma Desktop Environment 😉

42. My issue is there's no wifi icon. For my hp pavilion x360 convertible. Researched this problem no answers.

43. %3 cpu and maybe %5 of your ram is killing your system? always disable things you don't want or need, but i'm curious if your boot drive is an ssd or not.

44. Bringing up KDE Neon again, I know, you're sick of it being mentioned. Its baloo_file is stable. 😉

45. I'm logged in on Gnome, and baloo was indexing files according to the time stamps in the local directory, I'll look at the status after a log-in/reboot happens.

46. Now that explains why Ubuntu keeps freezing on my laptop for another "Blue Screen of Death" problems in a Linux laptop.

    Also don't drink and root (rm -rf /*)

47. What KDE crashed :O?????? Some say it never crashes 😐 I AM

    NOT SHOCKED 😐

48. Cool….. going to pass along this video to my friend who loves kde

    But easiest way I found install mate or xfce….problem solved

49. its slow for me even after disabling it
    gotta try it again when i install arch again

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