It was my understanding that baloo_file wwas supposed to only eat up RAM recently after boot; but the ram use should die down a while afterwards (only supposed to use that much ram while indexing files, not after it’s done) and this often seems true enough.
Unfortunately though, with my computer having been running for a while (hours or even days), I’ll look at my ram use again and see baloo_file right at the top eating anywhere from 2-8GB of RAM for no apparent reason.
Why is this happening and what (besides disabling baloo file indexer) can I do to prevent it?
I’ve been running my pc for 3 days now, baloo_file currently sits at 3gb ram over the past hour. It is idle (e.g. I don’t see it popping up as something with high cpu use)
It’s just sitting there and eating up my ram. I doubt it takes longer than 3 days to finish indexing.
Do you have it set to also index the content of files? I have it index only the files themselves, and on my system it’s only taking up about 4 MiB of itself and 29 MiB of shared memory.
System Settings → Workspace → Search → File Search → Also index file content
We wouldn’t know, would we? We’re not Baloo, dancing away on the resources.
Anyway, I recall @ButterflyMelissa, also having to deal with this situation, so maybe she can offer you some assistance.
In fact I did, this was a good thing to know. Disabling it didn’t seem to immediately solve the issue though, baloo is still idle, sitting there and eating 3GB of RAM after disabling this, but maybe it’ll help in future boots?
At least I see no reason to index file contents, that seems like a kinda pointless yet absurdly resource intensive thing.
Was unsure if this was the case with mine, as you didn’t seem to have a problem. So I checked,
Lo and behold! Mine was set for files as well. Turned that off, set my (Not always mounted) cloud drives to not index, as well as my data drive, and it works like a charm now. So THANK YOU again. Now I also know 'bout it!
I would recommend stopping and purging Baloo and then restarting it, so as to let it index only the file names. See…
balooctl --help
Perhaps not entirely pointless, but definitely absurdly resource-intensive, yes, which is why I have it index only the files and not their content.
Also, as per @Mirdarthos’ post, you can exclude certain paths and volumes from being indexed, which also helps a great deal in keeping its footprint manageable.
