I recently updated my Ubuntu Studio machine to 24.04 LTS (from 22.04). Ever since that update, kioslave5 is spawning processes that endlessly churn my hard drive (yes, I still have a spinning hard drive) and my network. Killing all kioslave5 will stop both. For example, it’s happening as I type this. I see
ps -ef | grep kioslave
tonyb 17593 2010 0 10:14 ? 00:00:04 /lib/x86_64-linux-gnu/libexec/kf5/kioslave5 /usr/lib/x86_64-linux-gnu/qt5/plugins/kf5/kio/kio_http.so http local:/run/user/1000/plasmashellIxIGMe.15.kioworker.socket
tonyb 17598 2010 3 10:14 ? 00:00:54 /lib/x86_64-linux-gnu/libexec/kf5/kioslave5 /usr/lib/x86_64-linux-gnu/qt5/plugins/kf5/kio/kio_http.so https local:/run/user/1000/plasmashellOpDMoN.16.kioworker.socket
and nethogs shows kioslave5 constantly accessing my network adapter.
Most of the discussions here and on Reddit seem to center on Dolphin, but this behavior occurs whether I’m running Dolphin or not.
I’d appreciate any suggestions, thanks!
Hi, from past reports, this is likely caused by the thumbnail generation. Do you have network-mounted shares and/or do you have a lot of images in your drive(s)?
@mlincett thanks very much for taking the time to look into this and comment. I looked in the KDE Settings under “Online Accounts” and found a link there for Google Drive. I don’t think it was active, because I didn’t see anything in Dolphin under the Network drives. But I deleted the Google Drive entry from the KDE Settings.
As far as thumbnails, yes, I saw some of those discussions. I probably don’t have an unusually large number of images; several hundred photos and whatever thousands of little jpg’s and png’s that are part of the KDE install. Would the suggested thumbnail generation only be when Dolphin or another file manager is active? Would it be a one-time thing, that is, once it’s done generating thumbnails for the images it would know enough not to continue ad infinitum? If the latter were the case I would be content to let it do its one-time thing.
In any case thank you again, it’s much appreciated.
It is supposed to be a one-time thing. I believe Dolphin spawns the process, and that persists even after Dolphin is closed.
Another thing could be the file indexer (baloo), but that should be recognisable in the task manager.
Looks like removing Google Drive from my “Remote → Network” category in Dolphin fixed it. (Google Drive still shows up in the Dolphin pane where the file list is, but I deleted the entry that comes up when double-clicking Google Drive.) Either that or the (hopefully) one-time thumbnail generation task completed. Thanks for the help.