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Running Ubuntu 20.04, all software up to date, on a Dell T5500 workstation with 2 six-core cpus and 48g ram. Using different graphics cards and drivers makes no difference.

When I leave my workstation on for any long period of time, gnome shell starts using more and more cpu cycles, and its response slows down. VLC and other video players' playback stutters every five to 10 seconds. Every application which updates its display regularly or uses the GUI does the same thing. The applications clearly aren't slowing down, just display updates and GUI. And gnome shell's cpu usage climbs to around 15% or even a little more instead of its usual 1% - 4%. I've written code to test this and it's clear that the code runs uninterrupted.

I find no evidence of significant memory leaks.

Because I often have applications which I wish to keep running, the only solution I've found is to kill gnome shell and wait for it to re-launch. This seems rather iffy and its incredibly annoying.

Does anyone know what's going on, and is there a way to fix it so this doesn't happen? This didn't happen until I upgraded to 20.04 from 18.04. It is rather disappointing.

DeeDeeK
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  • 1.) "kill gnome shell and wait for it to re-launch" — is "restarting gnome-shell" entirely equivalent to this, or would that prove to be a bit less disruptive? (It goes by executing the r command in the "Run a command" dialog, accessed by Alt+F2 (so it's pretty quick/easy to perform)). 2.) There are various bugs reported on gnome-shell memory leaks, look through them. 3.) I'm on a fresh install (not a result of an upgrade) of stock Ubuntu 20.04 since last December, and I don't have this bug. – Levente May 26 '21 at 16:01
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    any gnome-shell extensions? – nobody May 26 '21 at 16:27
  • Edit your question and show me ls -al ~/.local/share/gnome-shell/extensions and ls -al /usr/share/gnome-shell/extensions and top and free -h and swapon -s. Start comments to me with @heynnema or I'll miss them. – heynnema May 26 '21 at 19:46
  • Now I remember to have experienced gnome-shell lags briefly: in my case, the cause was the Nemo file manager that I installed on my Gnome 3 system (so not in its native Cinnamon desktop). The results were very heavy gnome-shell lags. I have almost forgot about this episode because 1.) I ended up using Thunar instead, 2.) even found a settings combo with Nemo (using less features of it) that pretty much tamed down the issue. – Levente May 26 '21 at 19:47
  • Status please... – heynnema May 28 '21 at 23:44

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