KDE Lands More Power Management Tuning, Behaves Better On Btrfs File-Systems

[Chugworth]

I have actually found enabling Baloo to be useful because it lets you to take advantage of features like file tags. But can we PLEASE get the Dolphin file properties window to show the Details tab for files on SMB shares? Nearly all of the files that I want to search and tag are not stored locally.

[docontra]

Seems like pretty much everybody here has some story with Baloo (and before that, nepomuk). In my case

• File name indexing "just works" with Baloo (and very well too! esp compared with Redmond's offerings)
• File content indexing depends on the amount of files you have; in my case, the content indexer crashes on corrupted/broken/bit-rotted/whachamacallit files, making the indexer run pretty much always and balooning the storage requirements

The one big showstopper bug for me is that Baloo doesn't have a "VACUUM" or equivalent command (reclaim space on the DB files from deleted entries). Haven't noticed the btrfs "bug" mentioned in Nate's blog , although it may have played with/compounded my issues (have nearly always ran a btrfs root fs on my SSDs, but had the issue when the bulk of my data was on f2fs/ntfs filesystems)

EDIT: Read the Merge request, that bug is seemingly "triggered" if you have lots of subvolumes/snapshots and/or create/destroy subvolumes/snapshots regularly (something something bind-mount order?). Me having created my very first filesystem snapshot(s) this week was thus most-likely unaffected .

[EphemeralEft]

Why do indexing technologies exist when inodes are basically just a hierarchical key-value store? It seems like unnecessary overhead to me.

[Vistaus]

I agree with previous posters: Baloo sucks, even on my near-high-end system. Sure, it's better than Nepomuk, but not by a lot. Baloo really does feel like Nepomuk 2.0, so it still sucks.

[Vorpal]

The Baloo indexing service no longer re-indexes everything on Btrfs file-systems after a reboot.

Well, that explains a few things. I ended up disabling it.

[Termy]

I don't understand the hate towards baloo nowadays.
I mean yeah, in the past i have seen slowdowns, but those are long gone (at least for me).

I have it disabled because of the heavy TBW-load on my SSDs, wasn't aware that that was "caused" by using btrfs - so hopefully i remember to re-enable it when plasma 6 hits

[Schmellow]

Nevermind baloo, what about akonadi which pulls in a friggin DBMS?

[holunder]

Why do indexing technologies exist when inodes are basically just a hierarchical key-value store? It seems like unnecessary overhead to me.

Because you also want to search for the content of your files and documents.

[EphemeralEft]

Because you also want to search for the content of your files and documents.

There's no way the indexing service is storing the contents of files. In addition to doubling the size of your data, at that point the performance of indexed searching would be similar to regular searching.

[skierpage]

There's no way the indexing service is storing the contents of files. In addition to doubling the size of your data, at that point the performance of indexed searching would be similar to regular searching.

Why are you stating something so wrong so confidently? Baloo uses kfikemetadata to extract information from files, including terms in documents, and indexes them so you can search on these. Obviously large documents repeat words and have additional data, so Baloo's DB doesn't take up nearly as much space as the original documents. And even a killer tool like ripgrep (Rust crates FTW) can't find text in PDFs and documents that aren't plaintext.

Baloo has bugs (I list its known indexing limitations on a KDE wiki page), but if you need the feature, it's invaluable. I use it to locate text, open document format, and PDF files that have certain words in them. If you just searching by file name, real hackers use locate(1) .