Recently, baloo, specifically baloo_file_extractor has acting up on my mahine, consuming 100% of one of my CPU cores. I have to kill it everytime I log in, since last 5-6 days.

This is not the initial indexing which would normally take time. Also, this has never happened before.

Following suggestions given in similar threads on this forum, I looked for a solution on the Baloo Page of KDE Community Wiki . However, it doesn't say anything about baloo_file_extractor.

Further digging in the diff of the above page showed that the Vishesh Handa has removed the info on the extractor, presumably it being out of date or no longer relevant.

Similar threads in the forum have suggested to look up the file numbers in KSysGuard on which the extractor has hung up. However, that info doesn't show up (anymore?).

I do think that the extractor is stuck on indexing last few files. balooctl status is stuck at the same number of indexed files.

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Baloo File Indexer is running
Indexer state: Indexing file content
Indexed 51558 / 51579 files
Current size of index is 772.85 MiB


balooctl check responded with a message Started search for unindexed files but did nothing (no '*baloo*' process in KSysguard).

I think I can make some progress in finding the culprit if there is a way to list the files that the extractor is stuck on.

Regards,
Jayesh Bhoot

One way to identify a troublemaker file is

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qdbus org.kde.baloo /fileindexer org.kde.baloo.fileindexer.currentFile

I also just discovered the undocumented

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balooctl monitor

which does actually pretty much the same

ozone wrote:One way to identify a troublemaker file is...

This is great! While I am on a different system now, where baloo hasn't thrown any tantrums yet, it may only be a matter of time. This advice should come handy then.

In any case, this post answers the question I posed in this topic. So I will mark it solved. Thanks for your assistance!

running 18.10

baloo indexing is disabled, file search disabled

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mathieu:~ :-) (lifebook-wu2) $ balooctl status
Baloo is currently disabled. To enable, please run balooctl enable
mathieu:~ :-( 1 (lifebook-wu2) $ balooctl disable
Disabling the File Indexer

still the extractor is running, taking full CPU on one core.

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mathieu:~ :-( 1 (lifebook-wu2) $ ps auxww | grep baloo
mathieu   2363  4.1  1.8 268830460 383348 ?    SNl  11:03   0:30 /usr/bin/baloo_file
mathieu   3367  0.0  0.1 244880 39980 ?        SN   11:03   0:00 /usr/bin/akonadi_baloo_indexer --identifier akonadi_baloo_indexer
mathieu   6198  0.0  0.3 268774588 63764 ?     Sl   11:07   0:00 /usr/lib/x86_64-linux-gnu/libexec/baloorunner
mathieu  11523 85.4 10.7 270015792 2201992 ?   RNLl 11:08   6:09 /usr/bin/baloo_file_extractor
mathieu  14322  0.0  0.0  13304  4000 pts/1    S+   11:15   0:00 grep --color=auto baloo
mathieu:~ :-) (lifebook-wu2) $


parent process is baloo_file and parent process of baloo_file is 1, init
so it seems to be floating and not attached to akonadi...

I will kill

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mathieu:~ :-) (lifebook-wu2) $ cat /proc/11523/stat
───────┬───────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────
       │ File: /proc/11523/stat
───────┼───────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────
   1   │ 11523 (baloo_file_extr) R 2363 2362 2362 0 -1 4194304 460826 0 3 0 37351 8587 0 0 39 19 3 0 155207 276496171008 552501 18446744073709551615 93956210765824 93956210907501 140725803815792 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 17 7 0 5 3308 0 0 93956210932960 93956210937872 9395624205
       │ 9264 140725803824695 140725803824725 140725803824725 140725803827162 0
───────┴───────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────
mathieu:~ :-) (lifebook-wu2) $ cat /proc/2363/stat
───────┬───────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────
       │ File: /proc/2363/stat
───────┼───────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────
   1   │ 2363 (baloo_file) S 1 2362 2362 0 -1 1077936128 67084 313109 12 108 2105 955 13262 1066 39 19 3 0 125070 275282391040 101786 18446744073709551615 94910820499456 94910820774093 140731937410880 0 0 0 0 4096 66792 0 0 0 17 7 0 3 121 0 0 94910820834088 9491082084353
       │ 6 94910838403072 140731937412683 140731937412703 140731937412703 140731937415140 0
───────┴───────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────
mathieu:~ :-) (lifebook-wu2) $ ps auxww | grep 2362
mathieu  14389  0.0  0.0  13304  1784 pts/1    S+   11:17   0:00 grep --color=auto 2362
mathieu:~ :-) (lifebook-wu2) $


ok, it worked, killing only the extractor was getting auto respawn, killing both worked

KDE has become unusable on HDDs because of baloo. When you've been using your computer for a while and have many files on your disk, it takes ages to index everything. As mentioned above, it takes a lot of RAM and CPU, but for me, the worst thing has been the disk i/o consumption. If I don't kill baloo everytime I log in, my computer ends up freezing.

Here's your best friend if you have the same kind of issue :

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killall baloo_file; killall /usr/lib/baloorunner; killall /usr/bin/baloo_file_extractor

If a KDE developer sees this message, a great work around would be to apply cgroup restrictions on thoses programs to limit CPU/RAM/diskio usage. I've tried to do it myself, but I have not been able to find how those processes are started. Maybe it's more distro dependent ? Don't know.
It's really a shame because I love KDE, but this issue drives me crazy

Stopping baloo_file is the worst thing you can do, as it never has a chance to finish its initial run.

What do you advise then ? My laptop is not usable with it running...
Btw, don't know if it's a normal behavior, but my index file is 13GB big