kactivitymanager database 30GB in 3 days?

[whoami]

Greetings fellow users,
My first post here, so briefly: I've been using Xubuntu since version 12.04LTS, and switched completely to Kubuntu around 18.04LTS, which has been my daily driver ever since.

I upgraded my old trusty X201 to 22.04 and immediately hit some serious performance problems, mostly related to my account configuration (i.e. not affecting newly created users).

Problem:
The process kactivitymanager took a heavy toll on the CPU (fans running non-stop day and night) and started creating a database under ~/.local/share/kactivitymanagerd/ that - in just a few days - took over the entire remaining disk space on my SSD.

I had to delete all the files in that directory, and after reboot I'm enjoying some quiet time (no fans), but what can I do to prevent this from happening again and getting locked out?
Removal of that package wants to uninstall the entire DE

Any thoughts? Thanks!

[vanadiumboy]

I'm not sure what kactivitymanager is for. Try creating a new user account. You can create it from System Settings.

[whoami]

Thank you. I missed the response.
Solution (?): kdeactivitymanager subsided its activity after I killed the process and manually deleted the entire database. It never attempted to rebuild it.

[GreyGeek]

From:
http://github.com/KDE/kactivitymanagerd#readme

Introduction
When a user is interacting with a computer, there are three main areas of contextual information that may affect the behaviour of the system: who the user is, where they are, and what they are doing.

Activities deal with the last one. An activity might be "developing a KDE application", "studying 19th century art", "composing music" or "watching funny videos". Each of these activites may involve multiple applications, and a single application may be used in multiple activities (for example, most activities are likely to involve using a web browser, but different activities will probably involve different websites).

KActivities provides the infrastructure needed to manage a user's activites, allowing them to switch between tasks, and for applications to update their state to match the user's current activity. This includes a daemon, a library for interacting with that daemon, and plugins for integration with other frameworks.

Usage
Most applications that wish to be activity-aware will want to use KActivities::Consumer to keep track of the user's current activity, and KActivities::ResourceInstance to notify the activity manager of resources the user has accessed (this is not necessary for resources accessed via KIO, as a plugin is provided to do that automatically).

The other classes available in the API are primarily intended for use by the workspace to allow the user to view and manage available activities.

I don't use "activities" deliberately but I noticed that /home/jerry/.config/kactivitymanagerd-statsrc contain my list of "Favorite" applications.
My database is only 265Kb.

Do you use activities?
If so, you might try editing one of its several config files to change its behavior.
Attempting to remove kactivity managerd would also remove the "rdepends", so disableing it in one of its rc files is probably the way to go. Or, you could set up a cron script that delete the ".local/share/kactivitymanagerd/resources/database" file on a daily basis. You could set up a systemd service file that deletes it 10 minutes after the desktop target is reached, that way it wouldn't slow down your bootup or shutdown.

$ apt-cache rdepends kactivitymanagerd
kactivitymanagerd
Reverse Depends:
plasma-desktop
plasma-workspace
plasma-desktop
plasma-workspace
libkf5activities5


$ apt-cache depends kactivitymanagerd
kactivitymanagerd
Depends: libqt5sql5-sqlite
Depends: kio
Depends: libc6
Depends: libkf5configcore5
Depends: libkf5coreaddons5
Depends: libkf5crash5
Depends: libkf5globalaccel-bin
Depends: libkf5globalaccel5
Depends: libkf5i18n5
Depends: libkf5kiocore5
Depends: libkf5service-bin
Depends: libkf5service5
Depends: libkf5windowsystem5
Depends: libkf5xmlgui5
Depends: libqt5core5a
Depends: libqt5dbus5
Depends: libqt5gui5
Depends: libqt5gui5-gles
Depends: libqt5sql5
Depends: libqt5widgets5
Depends: libqt5xml5
Depends: libstdc++6
Breaks: <kactivities>
Breaks: <libkactivities-bin>
Breaks: plasma-desktop
Breaks: plasma-workspace
Replaces: <kactivities>
Replaces: <libkactivities-bin>

PS- I noticed that you deleted the database and it wasn't rebuilt. IF kactivitymanagerd is ever part of an update it possibly could be updated and the database restarted. Just a guess but ...

[claydoh]

Maybe related tho this bug report
https://bugs.kde.org/show_bug.cgi?id=453570
It was for the same general Plasma version as in 22.04

I use activities, with a few set up but I mainly only use 2 regularly. My database and related files are 10Mb at the moment (Plasma 5.27). It was higher when I was using Latte Dock and unique panel styles per activity, but I don't recall it ever being all that much larger than it is now.
.

[whoami]

Thank you all for your tips. The bug looks very similar to my experience, and no, I tried "Activities" but I was slightly confused as to what they do and don't do, for example I was trying to set up a single- vs multi-monitor environment inside Activities, but turned out that this wasn't part of what they're for. Activities turned out to be just another layer of abstraction that I didn't really need.

[jlittle]

IIRC kactivitymanagerd has little to do with "activities", rather it records things like file opens so that "recently used" gets populated even if the user opens something from in an application.