locate vs. baloo

Question

I have Ubuntu 18.04LTS.

I was used to locate as an indexed search tool. Combined with grep (and sometimes find) it is a swiss-army knife for file searching and inspecting.

I have yesterday noticed that something was eating up my little spare space available. Today I concluded ~/.local/share/baloo/index is the culprit.

The respective spaces taken are

/var/lib/mlocate/mlocate.db    47M
~/.local/share/baloo/index    7,5G

Is such a large difference normal? What additional information does baloo carry, to use such a large space? Can baloo be configured in a way that it uses a space similar to mlocate.db (even at the expense of some indexed information)?

PS 1: I didn't know about baloo until today.

PS 2: I have apt-get installed dolphin a couple of days ago, and I guess baloo came along.

PS 3: I have used dolphin since ancient times as well, in other systems, and I never noticed anything strange. I wouldn't know if in those other cases baloo was also installed but it lead to no issues, or if it was not installed at all.

Answer 1

This can be set in the configuration file ~/.config/baloofilerc (official documentation).

In particular, the setting that controls the amount of information indexed is the block

[General]
only basic indexing=true

This will trigger Baloo to only index the filenames. I did not try yet indexing this way and checking the used space.

PS: On a first reading, I did not find what other information is indexed if not set to "only filenames".

PS2: This is a helpful reading.