GNOME Bugzilla – Bug 657839
Performance decreases significantly with many windows open, even if not on the current workspace
Last modified: 2021-07-05 14:33:35 UTC
When I have more than about a dozen windows open, performance drops and task switching/program launching becomes almost unusable. This occurs even if most of the windows are on another workspace. I estimate about 800ms of latency between activating the activity overview (either by mouse or keyboard) and the overview displaying. There is a similar delay between clicking a window in the overview and the chosen window coming to the front. I'm using Linux 3.0 (Debian) on VirtualBox 4.1.2. My video card is an ATI Radeon HD 5850.
And what distribution, Shell, and video drivers version (proprietary or free?)?
Apologies, I forgot to attach the output of 'glxinfo'. I'll do that now. The Debian version is testing/unstable, with the GNOME 3 packages pulled in from experimental. Xorg is version 1.11.0, Mesa is version 7.11 and libdrm is version 2.4. Video drivers come from the VirtualBox guest additions which is at version 4.1.2. Their characteristics: server glx vendor string: Chromium client glx vendor string: chromium GLX version: 1.3 OpenGL version string: 2.1 Chromium 1.9 OpenGL shading language version string: 4.10 OpenGL vendor string: Humper The VM is hosted on a Windows 7 64-bit system running ATI/AMD's proprietary driver version 8.850.0.0.
Created attachment 195495 [details] glxinfo output
This is still a problem in 3.0.2
I'm also seeing this with the open source radeon drivers (I'm not 100% sure if I've seen this with the Intel Sandybridge drivers). On my desktop with a radeon HD 5450, it will slow down when you have a bunch of windows with big dimensions on a 1920x1200 screen: Evolution, Rhythmbox, Liferea, Gedit, web browsers... When you close some of those windows, or resize them to be smaller, you can notice the fluidity of gnome-shell's animations improve significantly enough that you can "feel" it. I'm not sure if this is purely a driver issue or something that could be optimized in mutter, clutter or gnome-shell.
*** Bug 700743 has been marked as a duplicate of this bug. ***
GNOME is going to shut down bugzilla.gnome.org in favor of gitlab.gnome.org. As part of that, we are mass-closing older open tickets in bugzilla.gnome.org which have not seen updates for a longer time (resources are unfortunately quite limited so not every ticket can get handled). If you can still reproduce the situation described in this ticket in a recent and supported software version, then please follow https://wiki.gnome.org/GettingInTouch/BugReportingGuidelines and create a new ticket at https://gitlab.gnome.org/GNOME/gnome-shell/-/issues/ Thank you for your understanding and your help.