Just did an upgrade from stretch, baloo is now doing the same thing nepomuk did back in the day. On logout, baloo_file process remains, so restarting the xserver causes duplicates, thus hanging up the baloo_file_extractor, and eating memory and cpu until crash... quick and dirty workaround: ~/.config/plasma-workspace/shutdown$ cat kill_baloo_file.sh #!/bin/sh killall baloo_file