15

I upgraded from 17.04 to 17.10 on my XPS13 9360 and have, as others, tons of issues. This one now is that the process

/usr/bin/gnome-shell

has a way to high CPU usage of constantly between 20 and 30%:

PID USER      PR  NI    VIRT    RES    SHR S  %CPU %MEM     TIME+ COMMAND                                                                                                     
2026 xxxxxx   20   0 4264020 703284 315308 S  29,6  4,3   9:32.37 gnome-shell

The used version is

$ gnome-shell --version
GNOME Shell 3.26.1

This happens directly after booting the system with nothing open except a terminal running htop (beside some startup apps such as Dropbox) but clearly no heavy graphics programs. I don't know where to start, here are some information about my graphics card

$ lspci | grep VGA
00:02.0 VGA compatible controller: Intel Corporation HD Graphics 620 (rev 02)

$ glxinfo | grep -i render
direct rendering: Yes
    GLX_MESA_multithread_makecurrent, GLX_MESA_query_renderer, 
    GLX_MESA_multithread_makecurrent, GLX_MESA_query_renderer, 
Extended renderer info (GLX_MESA_query_renderer):
OpenGL renderer string: Mesa DRI Intel(R) HD Graphics 620 (Kaby Lake GT2) 
    GL_ARB_conditional_render_inverted, GL_ARB_conservative_depth, 
    GL_NV_conditional_render, GL_NV_depth_clamp, GL_NV_packed_depth_stencil, 
    GL_ARB_conditional_render_inverted, GL_ARB_conservative_depth, 
    GL_MESA_window_pos, GL_NV_blend_square, GL_NV_conditional_render, 
    GL_OES_element_index_uint, GL_OES_fbo_render_mipmap,

Please let me know what else I should post in order to trace this issues -- many thanks!

muru
  • 197,895
  • 55
  • 485
  • 740
Christian
  • 381
  • If your video card is relatively under powered gnome-shell uses llvm-pipe to use your cpu for 3d effects. You can try an alternate DE or google search to see if there is a solution for your graphics card or work around (you did not tell us much about your system or want is using your cpu). – Panther Nov 02 '17 at 15:06
  • Please post the output of glxinfo | grep -i render – Charles Green Nov 02 '17 at 15:52
  • I have hadded some info. I don't think I have any heavy graphics load, it happens right after booting. @Charles Green : done, thanks. – Christian Nov 02 '17 at 16:03
  • K - it appears that you are using the card for the 3D rendering (mentioned by @panther) – Charles Green Nov 02 '17 at 16:09
  • Can you run top and determine what is using your cpu ? – Panther Nov 02 '17 at 17:14
  • @Panther: added above. this is, as written, the gnome-shell process. – Christian Nov 02 '17 at 17:44
  • You can file a bug report against gnome shell. If you google search there are a variety of suggestions, but I do not know what is most current with Ubuntu. https://ask.fedoraproject.org/en/question/62522/gnome-shell-very-high-cpu-usage-on-a-clean-install-f21/ and https://askubuntu.com/questions/929903/gnome-shell-high-cpu-usage-and-huge-syslog and https://askubuntu.com/questions/369517/gnome-shell-with-very-high-cpu-usage – Panther Nov 02 '17 at 18:19
  • Thanks @Panther, I had already been looking at all these and also others, but I don't have any of these gnome extensions running and already use the video card for rendering... – Christian Nov 02 '17 at 18:24
  • I'm having the same problem (17.10, gnome-shell: 3.26.1) but I'm confused since my graphics card isn't terribly underpowered: $ glxinfo | grep -i render direct rendering: Yes OpenGL renderer string: GeForce 930M/PCIe/SSE2 – bb94 Nov 07 '17 at 02:52
  • 1
    @bb94, for me it turned out that the gnome-shell process went down to below 10% when turning off the system monitor https://extensions.gnome.org/extension/120/system-monitor/. Writing this as an answer now. – Christian Nov 07 '17 at 09:28
  • 2
    @ChristianStump That would be great if I didn't already have it off. – bb94 Nov 07 '17 at 17:09
  • 1
    @bb94, I'm having the same issue with 20-30% gnome-shell CPU usage (with only terminal open), and I don't have any gnome extensions running. – user36196 Nov 11 '17 at 00:17

2 Answers2

12

It turned out that the gnome-shell process went down to below 10% when turning off the system monitor extension https://extensions.gnome.org/extension/120/system-monitor/.

It also stays below 10% when increasing the refresh time to 1sec, while it went up again as soon as I moved it below 1sec.

Christian
  • 381
1

I have come across the same gnome-shell cpu hog issue and it was kmailservice5 that fires up the cpu when you don't have Thunderbird. Whenever I click on a mailto link, the cpu goes crazy and so does gnome-shell and kmailservice5 does nothing. It's a reported KDE bug and has been fixed since but for other Ubuntu LTS like 16.10, the fix is to uninstall kmailservice5.

adrien
  • 121
  • 4