Okular processes continue running after all application windows have been closed

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I was using Okular to view PDF files produced by LibreOffice Draw. I noticed a few conditions that were present concurrently. I don’t know if they are related or correlated (and, if so, which one is the culprit), or whether these conditions just happened to occur at the same time.

  1. several okular processes continued running after I had closed all Okular windows (exited the application completely), and using over 90% CPU time.

  2. several baloo_file_ext processs were running, also showing over 90% CPU usage.

I did not open the same file multiple times simultaneously via multiple Okular instances. I read some forum posts on various internet forums from years past saying that this could cause Okular to go crazy. I was only viewing one file, the PDF that I created using LibreOffice Draw. Here is the scenario.

  1. created a .odg file using LibreOffice Draw.
  2. exported to PDF.
  3. viewed the PDF using Okular.
  4. closed Okular.
  5. created updated .odg file.
  6. exported updated .odg file to a new PDF of the same name as the first PDF.
  7. viewed the updated PDF using Okular.
  8. closed Okular.
  9. repeat several iterations from step #5.

The PDF file looked fine in Okular. I could not detect a malformed PDF file. However, LibreOffice Draw could not create a PDF that included all pages of my .odg file. There might be a problem with Draw. I’m going to post a question about this on ask.libreoffice.org.

After performing the above cycle a few times I noticed that there were at one point 7 unique okular processes running.

At the same time, there were multiple baloo_file_ext processes running. I think they were trying to index the newly created PDF files. In fact, that is what I saw in “ps -aux” output, that the name of the PDF files I had created were shown as the argument on each line of “ps” output for the baloo_file_ext process entries.

I let the processes run for over 45 minutes just in case it was running correctly but just needed a lot of processing time. However, after 45 minutes, I killed the processes. I can’t imagine how it could take so long to index a PDF with sparse amounts of text in it.

While the CPU usage was high (94%+) my computer’s fan was running at its highest speeds. When I killed the baloo_file_ext processes, the fan went to its lowest speed. Okular processes were still running, but somehow not causing the fan to spin at the high speeds. However, “ps -aux” output showed that the okular processes also had very high CPU usage, 99.4% (see referenced screen grab).

“top” output showing okular using 99.5% CPU…
https://storage.imgbly.com/imgbly/z4zPCFw0sG.jpg

“iostat 5” output, taken at the same time, seems nominal. “sda” and “sdb” are my two external USB Western Digital back up hard drives. “nvme0n1” is my internal solid state drive.
https://storage.imgbly.com/imgbly/k5uPJKg7EP.png

$ cat /etc/os-release
NAME="Fedora Linux"
VERSION="42 (KDE Plasma Desktop Edition)"
RELEASE_TYPE=stable
ID=fedora
VERSION_ID=42
VERSION_CODENAME=""
PLATFORM_ID="platform:f42"
PRETTY_NAME="Fedora Linux 42 (KDE Plasma Desktop Edition)"
ANSI_COLOR="0;38;2;60;110;180"
LOGO=fedora-logo-icon
CPE_NAME="cpe:/o:fedoraproject:fedora:42"
DEFAULT_HOSTNAME="fedora"
HOME_URL="https://fedoraproject.org/"
DOCUMENTATION_URL="https://docs.fedoraproject.org/en-US/fedora/f42/system-administrators-guide/"
SUPPORT_URL="https://ask.fedoraproject.org/"
BUG_REPORT_URL="https://bugzilla.redhat.com/"
REDHAT_BUGZILLA_PRODUCT="Fedora"
REDHAT_BUGZILLA_PRODUCT_VERSION=42
REDHAT_SUPPORT_PRODUCT="Fedora"
REDHAT_SUPPORT_PRODUCT_VERSION=42
SUPPORT_END=2026-05-13
VARIANT="KDE Plasma Desktop Edition"
VARIANT_ID=kde
$