Hi Duncan On Thu, Aug 13, 2015 at 5:02 PM, Duncan <1i5t5.dun...@cox.net> wrote: > Mark Knecht posted on Thu, 13 Aug 2015 14:36:35 -0700 as excerpted: > >> I'm not sure if this is a Gentoo issue or a KDE issue so I'll start >> on the KDE list. Thanks in advance. > > Arguably, it's a kde as upstream issue, but gentoo offers the possibility > of mitigating it, arguably more than most binary distros. =:^) >
:-) >> I have a problem that's developed recently. The basic symptom is >> the machine slows down horribly at some point in the afternoon with the >> disk activity light is full on - no blinking at all. This results in all >> applications - Virtualbox, Chrome, etc. - essentially ceasing to operate >> correctly and KDE to sometimes locking up for 5-10 minutes. >> Due to recent messages from Gentoo devs requiring baloo I've started >> looking there. >> >> When I'm in this state where disk activity appears to be 100% I see >> large wait percentages in top. (3 CPUs in this state right now.) Running >> iotop it appears that something called baloo_file_extractor is spending >> 99.9% of its time waiting. > > Yeah... that behavior is why I decided the (small to me) benefits of > semantic-desktop in general weren't worth the down side. Tho the > tradeoff is arguably different for each person/use-case, the basic > problem remains the exact same one it was back before the turn of the > century[1], when the first thing most computer-knowledgeable folks did to > an MS Office installation was disable its indexer functionality. > OK, so the KDE documentation suggests that it can be turned off using System settings -> Desktop search and at the bottom there's an entry for 'Enable Desktop Search' so I've unchecked that and will see how it goes tomorrow. <SNIP> > > While it might be possible to throttle baloo to some extent (I'm not > actually sure because like the nepomuk before it, it's banished from my > system), and at least back in the nepomuk era when I rid myself of it, it > was in theory possible to turn off at runtime, at least in my experience, > actually building kde with USE=-semantic-desktop (obviously not an option > on distros where the binaries come pre-built, thus my remark above about > gentoo making a workaround easier) and without related flags and packages > [2], then depcleaning them from the system, made kde *SURPRISINGLY* > faster. "Surprisingly", because I /thought/ the runtime turnoff actually > did so, and the build-time disable and depclean was primarily to clean up > the dependencies. But /something/ was obviously still sucking > performance as I'm not kidding, after getting it off the system entirely, > it was as if I suddenly had a couple extra cores or had upgraded at least > a half a GHz in cpu speed, which REALLY surprised me. It felt like I > guess the MS users must feel after they get the malware cleaned off! > In that regard there are two packages that use the flag, dolphin & gwenview. Depending on how things go tomorrow just having disabled it I'll give rebuilding those two a try. > While I can't guarantee similar effects to everyone, ridding your system > of semantic-desktop and the baloo indexer and akonadi, should at minimum > guarantee that it won't run and effectively lock you out of normal > operations on your system for minutes at a time. > One would hope! > And actually, the gentoo/kde devs have recently cleaned up the old > akonadi deps in the old pre-akonadi-kmail kdepim-4.4.x series as well, so > you shouldn't even require akonadi and via it, semantic-desktop, for the > non-akonadi kmail/kdepim stuff, either. The other alternative being to > switch to non-kdepim solutions for mail and related (IM, feed-reader, > etc). I've been rather happy with claws-mail since I switched to it > here, altho the migration from kmail isn't as simple and easy as I would > have liked. > > If you have detail questions and would prefer to take it to the gentoo- > desktop list (or gentoo-amd64, but the desktop list is more topical), > that's fine, or continue here if you like, since it /is/ kde-linux > related, and I'm on both this the kde-general and kde-linux lists and > those gentoo lists. > I'll try these ideas out over the next few days and see what happens. I generally just use locate to find things so none of this overhead is necessary for my normal day to day life. Thanks! Cheers, Mark ___________________________________________________ This message is from the kde-linux mailing list. Account management: https://mail.kde.org/mailman/listinfo/kde-linux. Archives: http://lists.kde.org/. More info: http://www.kde.org/faq.html.
