My new KDE Plasma desktop has become sluggish, and my laptop’s palm rest is heating up. The CPU fan is roaring like a beast. I checked htop to see the system processes and found that baloo_file_extractor is using a lot of CPU. Checking the I/O, I saw that baloo_file_extractor is intensively writing to my disk.
What is baloo? It’s a file indexer used in the KDE Plasma system. By default, it doesn’t just index the file names but also the file contents. While it was created for good reasons, it’s causing a lot of strain on my system.
To save my system, I went to KDE System Settings > Search > File Search, and then changed Data to index to “file name only.” I also didn’t want all files in my home directory indexed, so I set it to exclude /home/sumar. Lastly, I added specific folders I wanted to index.
Now, my laptop is more stable, with no unnecessary heat and no intensive writing to the disk.