Baloorunner suddenly fills up all RAM

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1

While I am working, I notice that suddenly RAM is being consumed increasingly, i.e. within about 30 seconds the RAM consumption goes from about 22 GB upt to 64 GB, and swap space is being filled up at the beginning of this process. The PC almost freezes. After a short while, though (maybe another 30 seconds), the RAM consumption is reduced back to 22 GB and a message pops up:

The background process plasma-baloorunner.service was stopped by the Linux kernel, because there was not enough RAM left. Unused applications and subwindows of the web browsers should be closed.

I assume that the sudden RAM consumption was caused by baloo-runner, because after that I can work without problems. The fancy thing is that this happens in greater distances, maybe once every hour (I haven’t observed it too closely). Is this a known bug, or is it something that could be caused by settings on my PC (I haven’t changed a lot, or better, nothing that I am aware of)? Or should I report it to KDE?

Thanks for your input.

P.s.: This happens since the before last system upgrade. Before that, there were no problems with baloo for a long time.

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That’s quite possible. To me, it sounds as though baloorunner has got stuck indexing a specific file. By default settings it also indexes the file content. To verify the suspicion please open the system settings and go to “File Search” (you can type “baloo” into the settings’ search field). Inside the “File Search” settings change “Data to index” to “File names only” (i presume it is set to “File names and contents” when you open it and this would be the suspected culprit). Don’t forget to apply the new setting and report back whether this solves the issue.

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It’s bedtime here - but I JUST READ about this somewhere else, maybe KDE…

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