Baloo - how to lower priority

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1

Hi all,

Does anyone know how to lower the priority of Baloo, currently running at 30!

Kind regards
Pedro

2

Baloo is already set to ‘sane’ defaults (at least it is on Manjaro).

You need to be more specific about why, and about what issues you face.

Your forum (depending on what you’re running - you didn’t even mention this) should have advice.

For example, check the settings for ‘File Search’ and see if it includes hidden files/folders (Not a good idea)

Some steps to attempt.

Also, Plasma 6 :bulb: balooctl => balooctl6

balooctl stop
balooctl disable
rm -fr .local/share/baloo
balooctl enable
balooctl purge
balooctl check
balooctl status

It will take a little cpu to re-index, but generally it should be idle when you’re using the machine.

I never notice mine running, and I have it indexing quite a lot:

/home/ben
/mnt/T3/T3-Server
/mnt/T4/T4-Server
/mnt/W2/Movies
/mnt/W2/TV

The mounted drives are also pretty ancient rusty HDD’s - yet I still don’t notice baloo working.

Screenshot_20240627_094126

1 Like
3

Thanks for the reply.

baloo blocks access to my hard drive for 4-5 hours after a reboot. It is okay if I just exit a sleep state.

I have tried all of the balooctl stuff - nothing works!

sudo kill baloo works :slight_smile:

I want to try and lower its priority. Do you know how?

Kind regards
Pedro

4

Does anyone know how to lower the priority of Baloo, currently running at 30!

Really? That’s wierd.

Normally it sets its priority down at 39, that a “nice 19”. It’s probably deep history but priority (that you see as PR in htop) is 20 by default. It’s a little strange that the larger the number, the lower the priority. The “nice 19” means “be very nice” and give up the CPU to anyone who asks.

On systemd based systems it also runs under a kde-baloo unit file which sets “CPUWeight=1”. That’s the minimum number (although there seems to be a “CPUWeight=idle” which lowers the limits further)

If you are running with priority 30, we ought to find out why. Have a look and see what “systemctl --user status kde-baloo” says.

Secondly it’s important to know what system you are using (and whether it is up to date) and what filesystem is being indexed (it would be good to know if it is BTRFS and if you are, whether you are running any snapshots).

These would be good questions to know the answers to if your trouble is after a reboot rather than just after logging out and back in again…

Edit: Tidying the text a little…

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5

I can see that my baloo_file process has a CPU nice value “19 (least favorable to the process)” per the htop command output. Regarding disk impact (ionice), i did “ionice -p 3864514” (the number is the pid of the baloo_file process) and it returned: iddle

What does it mean? “ionice -h” shows:

 -c, --class <class>    name or number of scheduling class,
                          0: none, 1: realtime, 2: best-effort, 3: idle
 -n, --classdata <num>  priority (0..7) in the specified scheduling class,
                          only for the realtime and best-effort classes

so I assume that it means that baloo 5.103.0 is already set to use lowest CPU and disk priority by default, yet it still is significantly slowing down computer at times (iowait, 2 seconds delay in some actions) to the point one needs to bother finding the cause and killing the baloo since the “balooctl suspend” fails to stop the baloo. I have tried to disable hidden files indexing now and exclude certain large folders from index, both using app launcher, type “search”, click “File search”. And also I have now set a cronjob in “crontab -e”:
0 0 * * * balooctl check

in hope that ballo will do most work at midnight (0 minute of the 0 hour).

I am on a Debian 12, baloo 5.103.0, SSDs with rather large index of 20 million files, 12GB index being on a drive with like 5% of a free space. If you have any more ideas what to try, please kindly share it. Thanks

$ inxi -DSz
$ df /
$ balooctl status
$ balooctl indexSize
$ baloosearch baloo -d /home # search for baloo configuration files
$ cat /home/user/.config/baloofilerc
$ cat /home/user/.config/baloofileinformationrc

6

20 million files is insane - that’s probably your problem.

I’d check those settings, make sure you didn’t include hidden files - or that you exclude folders that aren’t required (like .cache).

7

After complaining about baloo on a few different sites, mysteriously, baloo began behaving itself again (following an update).

I did notice that the daemon changed it name to baloo_file.

Prior to that, the only way to stop it was:

~>ps -A|grep baloo
to get the PID. Then
~>sudo kill PID

I how that helps.

Kind regards
Pedro

8

It didn’t. baloo_file is the metadata/content extractor program the daemon uses and calls in.

If this program is stuck or crashes, it is caused by a file triggering an issue within this utility.

You can use balooctl6 status to know which file it is, and if possible upload the file in a bug report.

You can use pkill <program> to achieve the same.

1 Like
9

@meven, if you are the person that fixed it - thanks…

10

Are you running BTRFS?

You are indexing just filenames (as in “only basic indexing=true”) so you really should not be requiring a 12GB index.

If you’re using BTRFS and have not reindexed in the last year, the index has duplicates (there was a patch specifically for BTRFS in April 2023).

The “balooctl status” says 20 million files indexed, do you have 20 million files on disk?

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