4 ms·

Many projects really miss some section on their homepage which briefly compares itself to similar or related projects. I assume there are many related projects.

Many projects really miss some section on their homepage which briefly compares itself to similar or related projects. I assume there are many related projects. Most big desktop environments (commercial or open source) provide some similar service. I wonder about e.g. Baloo (Baloo is the file indexing and file search framework for KDE Plasma, https://community.kde.org/Baloo https://community.kde.org/Baloo). Is this similar? Or different? How is it different? Just yesterday my dad complained about a couple of Baloo error messages, Baloo crash reports, disk full, Xsession log full of Baloo messages. And he was not really aware about what Baloo actually is. The problem is similar to the one here: https://askubuntu.com/questions/1214572/how-do-i-stop-and-remove-kde-baloo-that-is-broken-and-filling-up-my-syslog-file https://askubuntu.com/questions/1214572/how-do-i-stop-and-re... So I disabled the content indexing, as it was suggested there. The stack trace of the Baloo crashes also suggested that it was related to indexing the content of some documents. I think this is a problem for many such file indexing services. Even Spotlight on MacOSX frequently crashes when it tries to index some documents. Does Recoll handle this differently? If Recoll is in general better than Baloo, maybe it should replace Baloo? Or Baloo can be extended to use Recoll under the hood?

vhanda 5y ago
Baloo Author here, though I haven't contributed code for over 4 years now. Baloo used to use Xapian under the hood, like Recoll, when initially launched, but in 2014 (I think?) I moved away from it to a custom DB built on top of LMDB. It resulted in a massive performance increase, one of the main criteria was for results to always take less than 'x milliseconds' (I can't remember exactly how much) so that KRunner (similar to OSX Spotlight) would always feel snappy. Another criteria was for Baloo to operate well with minimal memory and CPU, which wasn't the case with Recoll (Things might have changed since then) I do remember ensuring that Baloo always did content indexing in another process, though I can't remember at what point it blacklists a file. Sorry, this isn't the best answer to your question, but most of the details are now quite fuzzy to me, and I haven't kept up with how the project has changed after I stopped contributing to KDE. In retrospect though, I definitely should have spent far far more time ensuring that Baloo doesn't end up in situations like the one you described, and putting far more limits on the IO and CPU usage it's allowed to use.

vhanda 5y ago

Baloo Author here, though I haven't contributed code for over 4 years now. Baloo used to use Xapian under the hood, like Recoll, when initially launched, but in 2014 (I think?) I moved away from it to a custom DB built on top of LMDB. It resulted in a massive performance increase, one of the main criteria was for results to always take less than 'x milliseconds' (I can't remember exactly how much) so that KRunner (similar to OSX Spotlight) would always feel snappy. Another criteria was for Baloo to operate well with minimal memory and CPU, which wasn't the case with Recoll (Things might have changed since then) I do remember ensuring that Baloo always did content indexing in another process, though I can't remember at what point it blacklists a file. Sorry, this isn't the best answer to your question, but most of the details are now quite fuzzy to me, and I haven't kept up with how the project has changed after I stopped contributing to KDE. In retrospect though, I definitely should have spent far far more time ensuring that Baloo doesn't end up in situations like the one you described, and putting far more limits on the IO and CPU usage it's allowed to use.