GNOME Bugzilla – Bug 698461
Lag and jerkiness in Gnome Shell.
Last modified: 2021-07-05 14:42:34 UTC
Created attachment 242011 [details] Dmesg Gnome 3.2 is installed on this machine and runs flawlessly with no issues whatsoever. But every version after that, Gnome Shell 3.4, 3.6, and now current version 3.8 for which I'm reporting this bug suffers from poor performance. Researching on the net, it is possible the issue may be independent of the graphic card vendor. The most noticeable issue is when a window is selected from the overview, the slide animation tends to jerk many of the time. The workspace bar sliding is jerky also. And the overall experience is jerky and not smooth and flawless as was the case in Gnome Shell 3.2. This sucks for someone who wants to use Gnome as the primary desktop. Please fix the issue in the next point release! Hardware used: AMD Phenom 2 965BE 3.4Ghz x4, Gigabyte GA-880GM-d2h, Radeon HD4250 512Mb shared vram.
The animations are the problem. Setting St.set_slow_down_factor(0.9) makes everything much more fluid. In the default, everything feels sticky as if the windows are reluctant to launch when selected from the overview. And most windows launch back smoothly when selected, it is only some windows (like Empathy) that jerk when selected. But otherwise everything is fluid now after using that command in Looking Glass. You might want to look into that.
which distro are you using ?
Ubuntu GNOME 13.04 I've been using Ubuntu 12.04 (elementaryOS variant) with stock Gnome 3.2 installed and it's running flawlessly. I had been using Ubuntu GNOME edition 12.10 which had Gnome 3.6 and the animations were jerky in that. I have currently installed the Ubuntu GNOME 13.04 with Gnome 3.8 via PPA and the animations are jerky. To make sure the issue is not Ubuntu-specific, I have tried ROSA (Gnome 3.6) edition, and the animations are similarly jerky in that also. To rule out possible HDD issues, I've run both Ubuntu and ROSA from USB flash drive image and it's the same in that also. In all of them except v3.2 which is flawless, the entering and exiting overview, the windows seemingly have some lag making it feel not-smooth. And some apps, but not all, like Web and Empathy and possibly others, when they are selected from the overview, they very noticeably stutter for a bit when coming in front of the desktop. The combined effect is an overall jerky and annoying desktop.
Arch Linux x86_64 running GNOME 3.8 CPU: Core i3 2310m - GPU: Intel HD 3000 I confirm this issue. There are a couple of bugs with the Activities overview. First, it is laggy when moving windows or hovering the workspace list and eats 40% of one CPU. It seems that the windows positions are recalculated on each frame. Second, because of this behavior, windows are moving strangely when Native Window Placement is enabled, and even without this extension the issue appears in some rare cases. Two video captures to show the issue. With NWP - http://ge.tt/api/1/files/6lJT5If/0/blob?download Without NWP - http://ge.tt/api/1/files/9DehBIf/0/blob?download I hadn't any problem at all with GNOME 3.6. I hope this issue will be fixed soon.
In my case, I've been having problems on all releases since v3.4. But since yesterday, my problem has been solved in Gnome 3.8/Ubuntu 13.04. I'm not sure what exactly has fixed it, but I guess it might be the upgrades to bleeding-edge repo for Xorg, mesa, graphics drivers (xorg-edgers). I'm guessing that some changes from bleeding-edge components might have fixed the issue for me, and the problem might be a issue other than Gnome in my case. Although there are reports on the user mailing lists from person who has tried Gnome 3.8 on several machines with different intel, nvidia hardware and is experiencing lag and choppiness that wasn't there in any previous versions for them. But, anyway, since my problem has been solved, do with this bug report as you wish! Or the other users can take over. Thanks.
I can confirm what Clément is saying, that is animations went from smooth under Gnome 3.6 to laggy under Gnome 3.8. I am now runnig Arch Linux, but I tried using Fedora 19 beta 1 as well, and saw lag also there. Graphic card is an Intel HD4000. What I ruled out as possible offenders: - Intel RC6 power state: disabling RC6 does not help. - CPU scaling: using performance governor does not help. - Xorg Intel drivers: tried 2.21.x, 2.20.x, SNA, UXA and saw no difference. - Kernels: tried 3.7.x, 3.8.x, 3.9.x, no difference. Are there new animations in 3.8 that could make the overview less responsive? Any way to eventually disable them? I'll open a new report with more details, since the original poster here had his/her problem solved, but a quick hint would help me target the right thing for the new report :)
Bug still present on Gnome-Shell 3.16. A bit performance drop happened on Gnome 3.8 and hasn't been fixed yet. My Cpu is Core 2 Duo T6400 and GPU Intel GMA 4500.
I can confirm this bug is present on all distros with latest version of gnome (3.24). I run Arch and Solus on Intel hd 4400 but I also tried other distros with no luck. Only old Debian 8 runs fine but there is a lot older version of Gnome.
Does this still happen in a recent gnome-shell version, like 3.38 or 3.36?
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.