Baloo is the file indexer for KDE. It has little or nothing to do with Akonadi.
this post was submitted on 29 Jul 2023
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Hmm. Maybe it's all a coincidence. When one of my CPU cores was stuck at 100%, I opened htop and configured it to show kernel threads too. I spotted MariaDB running in the background. I thought "I don't remember installing MariaDB". Went to uninstall it with pacman, which said it's a dependency of Akonadi. After googling, I turned off Search Indexing and CPU usage dropped to zero. I'll keep an eye on it to see if the problem comes back.
Akonadi is a pig. Nearly 20 processes, each one using 20-150MB resident set (20-40MB unique set), multiplied by the number of users logged in. And then there's the other stuff it keeps resident, like mysqld.
That might be okay if I was getting something important from it, but I'm not. It provides zero value to me. It's just wasting RAM that I would rather use for other things.
Unfortunately, it's part of the Plasma dependency chain on my distro, so removing it would be problematic. When I find the time, I may build a custom metapackage to allow me to get rid of it without taking most of KDE with it.
Akonadi also hogs a lot of memory for services i never use (calendar and centralised mail service, not sure if thunderbirs uses them). It's not a problem for my desktop pc so i don't tinker with it, on my 8 year old laptop on the other hand I'm going to have to switch to something lighter in the future (lxqt or xfce).
Yeah, first thing I do on a new install is "balooctl disable".
https://wiki.archlinux.org/title/Baloo Section 5 shows how to disable it without installing anything.
I'd love it if the KDE devs made Baloo and Akonadi optional. Their insistence on including them reminds me of Micro$oft's insistence on bundling Internet Explorer and integrating it into the OS shell in Windows 98.
Lol last time I tried KDE a few years ago, Akonadi kept crashing. It made the DE feel like a buggy mess (it is) so I uninstalled it.
Sad not much has changed since then