I’ve noticed that evolution-addressbook-factory and gnome-contacts-search-provider are always running in the background and often use more than 10% CPU.
What exactly are these processes, and are they essential if I don’t use Evolution or GNOME Contacts? Can I safely disable them permanently?
Search providers are how Gnome-shell shows search results in the Activities overview. So, the gnome-contacts-search-provider is what is used to show search result from gnome-contacts. You can learn more about search providers in the documentation:
From what I know, gnome also uses the evolution-data-server for things like contacts now, and evolution-addressbook-factory is a process/daemon for the addressbook functions.
$ rpm -qf /usr/libexec/evolution-addressbook-factory
evolution-data-server-3.56.1-1.fc42.x86_64
$ rpm -qi evolution-data-server
Name : evolution-data-server
Version : 3.56.1
Release : 1.fc42
Architecture: x86_64
Install Date: Thu 17 Apr 2025 13:11:33 BST
Group : Unspecified
Size : 9038991
License : LGPL-2.0-or-later
Signature : RSA/SHA256, Fri 11 Apr 2025 08:51:16 BST, Key ID c8ac4916105ef944
Source RPM : evolution-data-server-3.56.1-1.fc42.src.rpm
Build Date : Fri 11 Apr 2025 07:59:30 BST
Build Host : buildvm-x86-30.iad2.fedoraproject.org
Packager : Fedora Project
Vendor : Fedora Project
URL : https://gitlab.gnome.org/GNOME/evolution/-/wikis/home
Bug URL : https://bugz.fedoraproject.org/evolution-data-server
Summary : Backend data server for Evolution
Description :
The evolution-data-server package provides a unified backend for programs that work
with contacts, tasks, and calendar information.
It was originally developed for Evolution (hence the name), but is now used
by other packages.
Are you seeing performance issues related to these, otherwise it’s fine to let them run. I’m not sure if one can remove the evolution-factories if Gnome shell now depends on them.