**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)
Make sure to avoid miscounting disk buffers. That’s kernel-owned memory that might eat a ton of RAM, but
- It gets freed instantly when your apps need more memory
- Until then, it increases your overall system performance by avoiding the need to read from storage (making it somewhere around 10ish times faster).
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:
> zramctl NAME ALGORITHM DISKSIZE DATA COMPR TOTAL STREAMS MOUNTPOINT /dev/zram0 zstd 8G 573,5M 138,6M 154,4M [SWAP]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.
“nothing open” - does þat also include Firefox?
IME modern KDE idle consumes a lot of memory, and every file indexing tool for boþ Gnome and KDE have always been hogs. You used to be able to turn it off.
librewolf wasnt open, atleast i didn’t see anything in system monitor
Baloo is indexing your file system, you can disable it, but its memory usage should drop once it is done. How long it will take to finish depends on how many files you have.
If memory usage is a concern you can always try a lightweight desktop environment but with 16GB you are just fine staying on KDE Plasma.
btop gives you a good oversight on where the resources go https://itsfoss.com/btop-plus-plus/
You should read into zram, It’s a very fast compressing method that will help you leverage some ram space. With your 16gb ram you could compress 8gb with a normal 2x compression rate. That would “net” you around 20gb usable ram space. With basically non existing performance penalties. You can also opt to compress all of your 16gb.
In layman’s terms it’s like downloading more ram. But it won’t help you get rid of your source problem.
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Non existing performance penalties?
Srsly? They might not be huge, but there are still some, or is compression/decompression for free?
Yeah, it’s quite amazing. I needed it for playing star citizen on Linux. It needs 48gb minimum on Linux and I had only 32gb. So I zram’ed 50% and was granted 50fps instead of 5.
But the higher the compression factor, the more perf. Penalty you’ll get. 2x is very very easy on the CPU.
It will still be faster than hitting the drives, whether that is a hard drive or nvme ssd. The compression code is highly optimized.
KDE provides a very large set of services. This makes it something of an elephant in the world of Linux desktop environments. Lighter DEs should fit in less than 1GB (that’s anything other than KDE and Gnome). I think the last time I checked my system with just the DE up and nothing open, it was using on the order of 200-300MB. However, the lighter DEs will also do less by default.
It should be safe to kill baloo, but as others have already said, you will see some tradeoffs in how file searching works if you stick with KDE. If I’m not mistaken, it may restart periodically to index new files unless you go to some effort to exorcise it.
File indexing allows (faster) searching of files and sometimes even allows finding files by their content not only the file name.
That said those indexers (I’m not using KDE so not sure about details of your specific case) can use an big amount of RAM especially if there are new files to index. As far as I unterstand they should pause if the RAM is needed otherwise but might depend on the implementation.
File indexing allows (faster) searching of files and sometimes even allows finding files by their content not only the file name.
At least for text files, grep can do that too. Off course it is not as fast as indexed files, but how often do you need that? There is ripgrep, a faster alternative. I personally don’t miss indexed files as I thought I would. With fast drives and CPU and the knowledge how to do a proper search does most of the stuff I need. Just my opinion. The price for an indexer is too high to me (and besides they were responsible for the death of my SSD… I believe).
As I understand it, Linux allocates a chunk of RAM when idle that is deallocated as needed by other processes
You might be thinking about caching.
What “background services” breaks down to is things like the desktop. In the system monitor you can see a breakdown of what that is if you click on “show details sidebar” in top right. On my system for instance, plasmashell and kwin combined(the interface) is taking 700mb. Without the info from the sidebar it is harder to give advice.
Baloo is used for searching you system for files including contents. You can disable it if it isn’t something you’d use, limit it to certain directories or limit it to file names only. It will be under search in settings.
Edit: Also check how much swap you have enabled in the system monitor overview. You might look into turning on zram support if it isn’t already enabled which will compress ram as needed which might improve your experience.
Edit: Also check how much swap you have enabled in the system monitor overview. You might look into turning on zram support if it isn’t already enabled which will compress ram as needed which might improve your experience.
If they have swap then zswap is better than zram because it works better with the Linux memory management.
Don’t know when it’s ready, but they’re working on a way for zswap to work without a swap disk set up. When that is done there shouldn’t be any reason left to use zram at all. At least not as a swap disk.
it says that i have 0B of swap
My old 8GB laptop runs amazingly well with an 8GB swap file and Zswap enabled. If you set up both with 16GB of RAM, your machine should be able to handle most anything easily.
If you have 0B’s total enabled, not to be confused with used, then I’d recommend either enabling zswap or zram. zram compresses only ram and zswap compresses ram and then moves it to the drive as needed. Enabling one will improve your experience in general as currently your system just will try to shove everything in ram until it is full and need hard reset.
See [https://wiki.archlinux.org/title/Swap#Swap_file](Arch Wiki Swap) and [https://wiki.archlinux.org/title/Zswap](Arch Wiki zSwap)
some distros don’t come with a swap file by default, you can manually add one though
Install htop, that may give more clarity on those “background services”. I am unfamiliar with baloo, but isn’t there a configuration file that may be tuned?
I’m on EndeavourOS, too. I don’t see anything near that kind of memory drain, but I’ve been using window managers instead of desktop environments for a long time.
For ages I had old, poorly specced laptops, and the big DEs like KDE would quickly cap what memory I had for actual software. And I’m not even a gamer, this would be GIMP or a plain browser that would crash because of too little RAM.
Even now, with more memory and better CPU, I stuck to the habit of using a WM instead, and everything really just runs better. You do sacrifice some eye candy and built-in functions, but IMHO it’s worth the tradeoff.
FWIW, I use the OpenBox install of Endeavour OS, with a few simple tweaks of my own. As far as I know OpenBox isn’t actively maintained, but it Just Works™.
baloo_file_extractor
Yeah that shit ain’t worth it. It’s part of KDE and I think you can disable it in the desktop settings.
alright thanks
If you set file search to filenames only instead of filenames and contents, it should be massively faster and searching for files by name will still work.
That is correct, the setting van be found at: System Settings -> Search -> File Search -> Disable
After that you could alsof disable the service.
- sudo systemctl disable balooctl Or
- sudo systemctl disable baloo
