I don't understand why baloo needs to use so much CPU for so long as opposed to updatedb which does it pretty much instantly. Can't baloo use the indexing from updatedb and get it over with? What does baloo do that locate doesn't do? Does it search inside files?

Thank you.

I wish to goodness that baloo is OPTIONAL dependency.

yzhang - updated doesn't index the content of files it only creates a list of existing files - they are not equivalent

you can disable the indexing in systemsettings

once indexed updating should be minimal unless there something funky in the folders indexed or you've encountered a bug

My experience is that Baloo never finishes indexing (been waiting for days now, had to kill -9 the baloo file extractor many times), and even in the unlikely case that it does finish, later on it decided for no apparent reason to reindex all my 900,000+ file yet again, making the system barely usable for several days more. I don't know. I have never seen an indexing service that hoggish, not even beagle (if anyone remembers it). My impression is, that baloo isn't actively maintained, it hasn't been optimized for years now.

Baloo can be turned off. I never used it. You could use some better yet still quite bulky stuff like recoll but for my needs I use fsearch. It's very fast and it fits what I need. Granted, gtk, but good.