Hi All,

I recently tried out the KDE/Plasma search (Baloo).

  1. Indexing full content was too slow (I have some 100GB of data), and I disabled it.

  2. Indexing filenames only was reasonably quick.

  3. The search was very restrictive (full words only, miscategorized files). To make it usable for me, I had to get a list of all files and dump it to fzf, which worked reasonably well.

  4. Using baloosearch6 to get a long list of files provides almost no noticable performance improvment over fd:

     > time ( baloosearch6 mimetype:application/pdf | wc -l )
 0.05s user 0.03s system 111% cpu 0.069 total


 > time ( \fd -H --no-ignore-vcs --xdev -tf -tl '.pdf$' | wc -l ) 
 0.24s user 0.15s system 364% cpu 0.107 total

    (Both commands found about 11,000 files. I’m using a SSD with about 500mbps read speed).

  5. If I try it again with a larger file set :

     > time ( baloosearch6 -d VSync/ '' | wc -l ) 
 0.23s user 0.10s system 123% cpu 0.264 total

 > time ( \fd -H --no-ignore-vcs --xdev -tf -tl --base-directory=VSync/ | wc -l )
 0.13s user 0.11s system 456% cpu 0.052 total

    This time baloo found 96000 files, and fd found 59000 files. (fd might have run faster cause of disk caching.)

fd used more CPU no doubt. But the wall time difference in performance is so small that it doesn’t make sense to me to use an indexed search anymore.

Any thoughts?

  • Björn Tantau@swg-empire.de
    2·
    4 days ago

    I hate the indexed search in KDE with a passion. When I want to use it the index doesn’t have the file I’m looking for. And when it’s indexing it’s using too many resources. And when I turn it off the search in Dolphin doesn’t work at all.

    It just never seems to do what I want.