**NOTE: i have only used linux for about a year or so and im not a power user, im basically a tired windows user but i know more stuff than most beginners i feel like? like not a lot more but a little bit ** so when i don’t have anything open my memory usage is like 4-5GB out of 16, which makes it pretty bad when i want to play games (even minecraft can make it so my pc use 99% memory so i have to hard reset, although i might have fixed that) and/or when i want some demanding theming things (like a live wallpaper). “Background services” is using like 4GB and “baloo_file_extractor” is using like 1GB out of the 4. I have done a tiny tiny bit of research and ive found out that baloo is a file indexing thingo, but idrk what file indexing is used for so i don’t know if i should disable it
distro: endeavourOS de: kde plasma wayland ram: 16gb of something (i have a prebuilt so idk what ddr it is or whatever)
if you need more info then please say so (i can’t show images for some reason)
Baloo (which is KDE’s file indexer, which is meant to speed up file searches) was borked earlier this year, and I don’t know if it has been fixed yet, but seemingly it’d keep doing symlink loops which of course isn’t useful. This is likely to happen when you have any wine-prefix installed so even just Steam installed will do this.
The fix on my computer was simply turning it off for all of my /home/$USER folder by adding the location in System Settings - Workspace - Search - File Search - Stop indexing a folder.
If you’re on an nVME SSD, and if you rarely do file searches anyway, I don’t see any problems doing this.
As for RAM, definitely check out Zram. It works by compressing unused parts of memory back into RAM. Here’s what 8 GB Zram looks like on my PC right now:
So it has compressed half a gigabyte of unsused memory down to ~150 megabytes, that’s a 3.7x compression rate, saving quite a bit of memory.
It’s very easy to set up, take a look here.
My config for reference, which ships by default with Nobara.
─────┬────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────── │ File: /usr/lib/systemd/zram-generator.conf ─────┼────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────── 1 │ # This config file enables a /dev/zram0 device with the default settings: 2 │ # — size — same as available RAM or 8GB, whichever is less 3 │ # — compression — most likely lzo-rle 4 │ # 5 │ # To disable, uninstall zram-generator-defaults or create empty 6 │ # /etc/systemd/zram-generator.conf file. 7 │ [zram0] 8 │ zram-size = min(ram, 8192) ─────┴──────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────Regarding stuff like which algorithm to use etc. the Arch wiki article on zram has some good info.
Summary of my reply: Baloo (and mlocate) were stuck on filenames with unusual characters in filenam, which probably caused the death of my system SSD.
Baloo is known to be borked from time to time, in the many years I used it before. I stopped using Baloo for a different reason. Baloo and the more general mlocate file indexer destroyed my previous system SSD. After replacing the drive, (without knowing what the issue was) I was careful and watched write and reads of the drive. And then I found the issue, Baloo (and later mlocate) did massive Gigabytes of writes and reads in short amount of seconds for long period. After examination I found out baloo (and later mlocate the same) were stuck on specific files. Those filenames had unusual characters, that normally would only be seen in binary file formats.
I don’t know if we can blame the indexers for this, but as far as I know those are the only applications with the issue. I’m not entirely sure if RetroArch can play those games (these are Rom files for old systems), but at least its file handling worked fine.