The Baloo indexer shipped with Plasma does its job in two passes: first the file
names are indexed (fast) then metadata and content are extracted (slow).
This second pass can be problematic and it's highly user-dependent, because
the various metadata extractors have varying degrees of efficiency. When there
is a problem with metadata extraction, it's often the cause of the high CPU
usage and disk I/O reported.
One proposal we had in IRC was to change the behavior of the indexer (which is
enabled by default): switch it to "basic indexing" which only indexes the
names and not the metadata, as a solution for the above problem. There's a
(config-only) option that does the job.
Due to a bug it was not possible to change that configuration and it was never
saved to disk. We also plan to add a checkbox to toggle the option on and off
in the configuration dialog (System Settings > Search) for those who use
metadata search.
However it's a behavioral change: anyone who uses the default configuration
will be affected by this. Hence this post to gather feedback. Should we do
this, or not?
NOTE: This is about the *default*. If you have disabled Baloo nothing will
happen.
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Luca Beltrame - KDE Forums team
GPG key ID: A29D259B