Since upgrading from Kubuntu 18.10 to 19.04, baloo_file_extractor is constantly gobbling up between 30-80% of my cpu and up to 50% of my 8gb ram, making my system slow and unstable.
Running balooctl disable does not seem to stop it, and if I try to kill its process it simply respawns.
In the short term, is there any way to disable it so I can get on with work.
And more generally, should I report this as a bug (have never reported to launchpad before so that I'd check here).
Thanks!
Beyond disabling baloo, the solution to fixing baloo on my machine was to increase the inotify folder watch limit, as described on the Arch wiki.
sudo nano /etc/sysctl.d/40-max-user-watches.conf
Add the line:
fs.inotify.max_user_watches=524288
Save, then re-enable baloo (assuming it had already been disabled):
sudo balooctl enable; sudo balooctl start
I came across this solution by looking through journalctl --since "1 day ago" and repeatedly finding the line KDE Baloo File Indexer has reached the inotify folder watch limit. File changes will be ignored. A web search of that pointed the way to the solution. Baloo now runs quietly in the background.
Hope that helps anyone else who experiences the same issue.