Serious Lag in 14.04

[ScottyK]

This just started up Friday. As I use 14.04, I'm noticing a serious lag in the applications. Amarok will pause for 2-3 minutes while playing songs, and be completly unresponsive. About half of the time Amarok IS playing, the graphical equalizer (or whatever it's called) will freeze, then resume.

Firefox is also slow. I'll click to open a new tab, and there is a pause. I'll go to scroll up or down a page, and there is a pause before it finally scrolls. Right click on a word to check the spelling will create a 10 second pause before the dictionary appears.

Also when typing (as I'm am now), there will be a lag, and the words don't appear on the screen, then suddenly everything I typed appears at once.

Opening the Kmenu, there is a lag when I type something in the search bar before the entire phrase appears.

I've got all the latest updates that are pushed down. For Nvidia I'm running the 331.38 version driver.

Amarok has "frozen" three times playing music while I typed this.

It almost feels like I'm trying to use the computer with only 256MB of RAM or something, instead of the current 8 GB.

[blackpaw]

Probably something hogging your CPU.'

Ctrl-Esc to bring up "System Activity", click on the CPU column to sort by load, see whats at the top.

[ScottyK]

Only thing out of the ordinary I see is the "baloo_file_extractor" which is in a constant state of "disk sleep". Never seen that before..

[blackpaw]

Right click the column headers to "Show Column 'Command'", that will show the command used to start baloo_file_extractor and I think show you what file it is trying to index.

After that try from konsole:

balooctl stop

And kill baloo_file_extractor if it doesn't stop of its own accord. See if that improves the responsiveness of your system.

[ScottyK]

Looks like it's trying to index itself!

/usr/bin/baloo_file_extractor

then there are a dun of numbers after it...

Stopping the process to see what happens.

"balooctl stop" - command not found.

[ScottyK]

Killing the baloo processes makes the system usable again. Is this a bug with 14.04?

[blackpaw]

Yes, but probably environmental and rare hopefully - has the issue returned for you?

[richb]

Experienced the same initially. It is indexing your files. Once done everything is back to normal. I would not call it a bug.

[sithlord48]

you can disable baloo in system settings -> desktop search by adding your home folder to the list of excluded folders. you may need to log out/ in for it to take effect.

[ScottyK]

I turned the machine off over the weekend, and today when I turned it back on, the lag problem is back Killing the process made it usable again.

Based on the suggestion above, I ensured all of my drives other than /home are on the exclude list. I'll let it index /home for a few days and see if it clears up.