Panic over. Some how I had picked up gnome tracker. It all started when I noticed some odd memory usage changes and got the impression that there were 2 cataloguing thingies at work. I'm not keen on them.
When I looked at kde search setting I had disabled file indexing but noticed that when I disabled the plugins that the were re enabled when I logged back into the desktop so thought that the problem was down to that. There's no sign of baloo in memory and tracker has now gone. Looking at it's directories it's a crawler and had managed to get up to 1gb. Baloo 1.8gb. The locate database file is just a few 10's of mb in size and going on the past considerably quicker. Baloo searches do seem to be pretty quick though. I here from other sources that tracker is needed by some gnome apps - just like that looked like it might happen on kde4 but thankfully didn't. @Rene. I mostly find I want to exclude /home from searches as I am a linux numpty in some ways and it's useful to see what's going on. I try to catalogue my stuff via directories. It's the only way long term and I wish I could stick to doing it every time I add something. ;-) I'm tempted to have a go at my own search facility using system calls. If I do I will have to pick up java so it wont need rewriting periodically. It's a funny area really. I don't keep music or video's on my machine. I do keep photo's. Photo processing software loves to catalogue them so it can finish up with several catalogues as linux needs several applications to match photoshop. The system makes a decent job of creating thumbnails - much quicker on 5 too so I don't need their catalogues. If I took my own video's I probably would keep them on my machine. Movies - an amazon fire stick with an application called something like kodi in it plugged into the tv. Plenty of free movies without kodi too. ;-) Some one in the house does have amazon prime though as they use it a lot. It might be possible to reprogram some other stick to do the same thing at zero cost. In case some one else has the problem- I just had a firefox update go nanny on me )-: wouldn't let me connect to one of kde's sites due to data safety etc. It seemed to be checking some server for valid certificates. Settings can disable that if needed - permanently in my case. John -
