On Fri, 2019-06-21 at 07:50 -0700, stan via users wrote:
On Thu, 20 Jun 2019 23:13:43 -0700
Jonathan Ryshpan <
jonrysh@pacbell.net
> wrote:

What is akonadi?  What is baloo?  Why does akonadi usually crash on
system startup?  Why does akonadi or maybe baloo sometimes use 100% of
cpu?  Why does akonadi or baloo cause a great deal of disk activity? 

There's this thing called web search now.  I was curious, so I did the
search.  Here are the results.

Thanks much for the pointer. I have been searching the web, probably not diligently enough.
Akonadi/Baloo is a powerful, complex, and poorly documented system.

Akonadi is a storage service for personal information management data
and metadata named after the oracle goddess of justice in Ghana. It is
one of the "pillars" behind the KDE SC 4 project, although it is
designed to be used in any desktop environment. It is extensible and
provides concurrent read, write, and query...

https://userbase.kde.org/Akonadi


Baloo is the file indexing and file search framework for KDE Plasma,
with a focus on providing a very small memory footprint along with with
extremely fast searching. 

https://community.kde.org/Baloo

If akonadi is crashing, it is probably misconfigured.  Do you have a
configuration file in home that is old, that has come through many
upgrades?  Try moving it to a backup name, and letting akonadi write a
new configuration file on your next reboot.
A very useful pointer.

baloo is indexing, and storing, things so that lookups can
be very fast when you are looking for something.

Is there any way to run KDE alarm without akonadi?

Try to remove KDE alarm and see if it wants to remove akonadi.  i.e. it
has a dependency on it.  It might be integrated.  You could also try
disabling akonadi and see if kde alarm still works.  I suspect the
answer is no, but I am just guessing.

I have taken the advice in 
https://docs.kde.org/trunk5/en/pim/kmail2/clean-start-after-a-failed-migration.html
on how to get akonadi to restore itself. My system now starts without the errors described.

And after a modest amount of dinking around, several akonadictl stops and starts, and some 
modifications to kalarm, I can now set alarms.