Good evening, I am writing here since I do believe people here might have found solutions already to my problems.
Sadly, I am the problem, as I love GNOME Shell (ops). Jokes aside, I love its interface and behaviour; although, it is really hard to use it on a real-context basis for me. What it happens is that if I execute RAM-consuming applications, GNOME Shell behaves really badly, swapping a lot with memory.
The usual scenario is me trying to send some e-mails, while I have Visual Studio Code and Firefox for some coding; usually, this leads to huge slowdown, up to making the system unusable.
This doesn't happen when using a GNOME-friendly i3 session, executing by far many more RAM-consuming applications (such as running Franz with multiple services, Telegram Desktop and others).
I got some good boosts from the following actions: - Disabling almost all the Shell extensions, except for my 'essential' ones. - Using a X11 session instead of Wayland - Tweaking swap and VFS parameters (there is a web article referenced in the ArchWiki which is really good)
So I have two questions: 1. Am I nuts? Did I do something really bad to my GNOME Shell without knowing that? How could I repair my setup? 2. If this is it (GNOME Shell is TOO heavy), is there any lightweight DE that offers something similar? I would need at least the search within apps and files for sure.
Thanks in advance for replies and sorry for such a long message.
Hi Giovanni,
I also use gnome shell and love it, I don't have any lags or memory problems. Tbh in the last 2-4 years it's the most productive thing i have.
Most of time I am running chromium (100tabs + YouTube), pycharm, gedit, lot of shells, MySQL Workbench and have several services running (sphinx, mariadb).
Running these things very fluently on a i7 4700 with 16gb ram and standard OCZ SSD. Especially IDE takes a lot of RAM and Visual Studio is well known on windows not to spare with it.
I have the same software setup on a Intel NUC with i3 and 8gb RAM. But with kodi, retroarch and a lot of instances node, cherrypy, mariadb instances. I don't use a IDE on it but whenever I do things on it it runs smoothly.
I would check the RAM and SSD, what setup do you have?
Giovanni Santini via arch-general arch-general@archlinux.org schrieb am Di., 6. Feb. 2018, 23:09:
Good evening, I am writing here since I do believe people here might have found solutions already to my problems.
Sadly, I am the problem, as I love GNOME Shell (ops). Jokes aside, I love its interface and behaviour; although, it is really hard to use it on a real-context basis for me. What it happens is that if I execute RAM-consuming applications, GNOME Shell behaves really badly, swapping a lot with memory.
The usual scenario is me trying to send some e-mails, while I have Visual Studio Code and Firefox for some coding; usually, this leads to huge slowdown, up to making the system unusable.
This doesn't happen when using a GNOME-friendly i3 session, executing by far many more RAM-consuming applications (such as running Franz with multiple services, Telegram Desktop and others).
I got some good boosts from the following actions:
- Disabling almost all the Shell extensions, except for my 'essential'
ones.
- Using a X11 session instead of Wayland
- Tweaking swap and VFS parameters (there is a web article referenced in
the ArchWiki which is really good)
So I have two questions:
- Am I nuts? Did I do something really bad to my GNOME Shell without
knowing that? How could I repair my setup? 2. If this is it (GNOME Shell is TOO heavy), is there any lightweight DE that offers something similar? I would need at least the search within apps and files for sure.
Thanks in advance for replies and sorry for such a long message.
-- Giovanni Santini My blog: http://giovannisantini.tk My code: https://git%7Bhub,lab%7D.com/ItachiSan My GPG: 2FADEBF5
Yeah, I had similar problems. I like gnome-shell, but I inevitably give up on it every time I try it.
Maybe w/ 16gb, it's fine, but with 4gb it was unbearable.
Gnome-shell itself would consume >20% of my ram, over time. I had to alt+f2 -> r[estart] gnome-shell frequently just to regain ram. If I had just gnome-shell with minimal extensions + firefox open, my system could enter swap hell.
Plasma was lighter than gnome-shell, although recently I've been hitting more swapping problems, yet again. Never as bad as when on gnome-shell though. I think its javascript engine just consumes a TON of memory, which is largely what makes firefox and chrome so heavy as well (stupid. javascript. Come on.).
This week, I moved back to a heavily customized xfce4, and all is well.
In the end, I'm sure it would be usable if my laptop didn't suck (it's many, many years old, 4gb of ram, core i3). But it's frustrating that the interface itself consumes so much ram that only one other app can reasonably be opened at a time. If I opened slack on gnome shell, I have to prepare for a REISUB (or, in the least, a RF) to escape swap hell.
My 16gb desktop doesn't care what's running though, obviously. More ram, better life. Nonetheless, 4gb SHOULD be more than enough for an environment + ONE web browser; but that's the world we live in. Devs care much less about using ram efficiently, more about using all the ram it can; the user 'can always buy more'.
On 02/06/2018 05:10 PM, Florijan Hamzic via arch-general wrote:
Hi Giovanni,
I also use gnome shell and love it, I don't have any lags or memory problems. Tbh in the last 2-4 years it's the most productive thing i have.
Most of time I am running chromium (100tabs + YouTube), pycharm, gedit, lot of shells, MySQL Workbench and have several services running (sphinx, mariadb).
Running these things very fluently on a i7 4700 with 16gb ram and standard OCZ SSD. Especially IDE takes a lot of RAM and Visual Studio is well known on windows not to spare with it.
I have the same software setup on a Intel NUC with i3 and 8gb RAM. But with kodi, retroarch and a lot of instances node, cherrypy, mariadb instances. I don't use a IDE on it but whenever I do things on it it runs smoothly.
I would check the RAM and SSD, what setup do you have?
Giovanni Santini via arch-general arch-general@archlinux.org schrieb am Di., 6. Feb. 2018, 23:09:
Good evening, I am writing here since I do believe people here might have found solutions already to my problems.
Sadly, I am the problem, as I love GNOME Shell (ops). Jokes aside, I love its interface and behaviour; although, it is really hard to use it on a real-context basis for me. What it happens is that if I execute RAM-consuming applications, GNOME Shell behaves really badly, swapping a lot with memory.
The usual scenario is me trying to send some e-mails, while I have Visual Studio Code and Firefox for some coding; usually, this leads to huge slowdown, up to making the system unusable.
This doesn't happen when using a GNOME-friendly i3 session, executing by far many more RAM-consuming applications (such as running Franz with multiple services, Telegram Desktop and others).
I got some good boosts from the following actions:
- Disabling almost all the Shell extensions, except for my 'essential'
ones.
- Using a X11 session instead of Wayland
- Tweaking swap and VFS parameters (there is a web article referenced in
the ArchWiki which is really good)
So I have two questions:
- Am I nuts? Did I do something really bad to my GNOME Shell without
knowing that? How could I repair my setup? 2. If this is it (GNOME Shell is TOO heavy), is there any lightweight DE that offers something similar? I would need at least the search within apps and files for sure.
Thanks in advance for replies and sorry for such a long message.
-- Giovanni Santini My blog: http://giovannisantini.tk My code: https://git%7Bhub,lab%7D.com/ItachiSan My GPG: 2FADEBF5
On 6/2/18 2:08 pm, Giovanni Santini via arch-general wrote
So I have two questions:
- Am I nuts? Did I do something really bad to my GNOME Shell without
knowing that? How could I repair my setup? 2. If this is it (GNOME Shell is TOO heavy), is there any lightweight DE that offers something similar? I would need at least the search within apps and files for sure.
Thanks in advance for replies and sorry for such a long message.
To be fair I run GNOME 3.26 on a really low resource netbook, with zram enabled. I'm actually surprised that it works as well as it does.
Handle 0x0001, DMI type 1, 27 bytes System Information Manufacturer: Acer Product Name: Aspire one 1-431 Version: V1.09
Handle 0x0004, DMI type 4, 42 bytes Processor Information Socket Designation: CHV Type: Central Processor Family: Celeron Manufacturer: Intel(R) Corporation ID: C3 06 04 00 FF FB EB BF Signature: Type 0, Family 6, Model 76, Stepping 3 Version: Intel(R) Celeron(R) CPU N3050 @ 1.60GHz Voltage: 4.0 V External Clock: 83 MHz Max Speed: 1660 MHz Current Speed: 1600 MHz Status: Populated, Enabled Upgrade: Slot 1 L1 Cache Handle: 0x0005 L2 Cache Handle: 0x0006 L3 Cache Handle: Not Provided Serial Number: To Be Filled By O.E.M. Asset Tag: To Be Filled By O.E.M. Part Number: To Be Filled By O.E.M. Core Count: 2 Core Enabled: 2 Thread Count: 2 Characteristics: 64-bit capable Multi-Core Execute Protection Enhanced Virtualization Power/Performance Control
Handle 0x0005, DMI type 7, 19 bytes Cache Information Socket Designation: L1 Cache Configuration: Enabled, Not Socketed, Level 1 Operational Mode: Write Back Location: Internal Installed Size: 32 kB Maximum Size: 32 kB Supported SRAM Types: Synchronous Installed SRAM Type: Synchronous Speed: Unknown Error Correction Type: Parity System Type: Instruction Associativity: 8-way Set-associative
Handle 0x0006, DMI type 7, 19 bytes Cache Information Socket Designation: L2 Cache Configuration: Enabled, Not Socketed, Level 2 Operational Mode: Write Back Location: Internal Installed Size: 1024 kB Maximum Size: 1024 kB Supported SRAM Types: Synchronous Installed SRAM Type: Synchronous Speed: Unknown Error Correction Type: Single-bit ECC System Type: Unified Associativity: 16-way Set-associative
Handle 0x000A, DMI type 16, 23 bytes Physical Memory Array Location: System Board Or Motherboard Use: System Memory Error Correction Type: None Maximum Capacity: 2 GB Error Information Handle: No Error Number Of Devices: 2
* Load average (uptime): 22:11:00 up 2:12, 1 user, load average: 2.05, 1.06, 0.79
* Memory usage (free -m): total used free shared buff/cache available Mem: 1904 1318 73 169 512 223 Swap: 4888 354 4534
* Top 5 CPU hogs (ps axuScnh | awk '$2!=3693' | sort -rnk3 | head -5): 1000 2309 12.6 11.7 2684972 228676 ? Sl 20:02 16:10 firefox 1000 2558 3.5 6.0 2161352 117076 ? Sl 20:07 4:21 Web Content 1000 1531 2.8 6.9 3496280 135244 tty2 Sl+ 19:59 3:41 gnome-shell 1000 1406 2.2 2.4 363948 48176 tty2 Rl+ 19:59 2:56 Xorg 1000 3625 1.0 0.2 132176 4832 pts/1 Ss 22:10 0:00 bash
* Top 5 Memory hogs (ps axuScnh | sort -rnk4 | head -5): 1000 2309 12.6 11.7 2684972 228676 ? Sl 20:02 16:10 firefox 1000 1531 2.8 6.9 3496280 135244 tty2 Sl+ 19:59 3:41 gnome-shell 1000 2677 0.6 6.1 2222848 119072 ? Sl 20:09 0:49 Web Content 1000 2558 3.5 6.0 2161352 117076 ? Sl 20:07 4:21 Web Content 1000 2107 0.2 5.0 3040848 97652 tty2 SLl+ 20:00 0:18 evolution
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On 02/06/2018 11:08 PM, Giovanni Santini via arch-general wrote:
Good evening, I am writing here since I do believe people here might have found solutions already to my problems.
Sadly, I am the problem, as I love GNOME Shell (ops). Jokes aside, I love its interface and behaviour; although, it is really hard to use it on a real-context basis for me. What it happens is that if I execute RAM-consuming applications, GNOME Shell behaves really badly, swapping a lot with memory.
The usual scenario is me trying to send some e-mails, while I have Visual Studio Code and Firefox for some coding; usually, this leads to huge slowdown, up to making the system unusable.
This doesn't happen when using a GNOME-friendly i3 session, executing by far many more RAM-consuming applications (such as running Franz with multiple services, Telegram Desktop and others).
I got some good boosts from the following actions:
- Disabling almost all the Shell extensions, except for my 'essential' ones.
- Using a X11 session instead of Wayland
- Tweaking swap and VFS parameters (there is a web article referenced in
the ArchWiki which is really good)
So I have two questions:
- Am I nuts? Did I do something really bad to my GNOME Shell without
knowing that? How could I repair my setup? 2. If this is it (GNOME Shell is TOO heavy), is there any lightweight DE that offers something similar? I would need at least the search within apps and files for sure.
Thanks in advance for replies and sorry for such a long message.
I think the only way to get a stable GNOME shell is to not use it. Plasma is much lighter than it used to be, so maybe roll with that? This is even more important on wayland because GNOME is also the Wayland compositor there - if it crashes, it can't restart like on X, everything dies. And the stability of GNOME won't improve unless they address core architecture issues, which will take years at best. So the only real short/mid term solution for Wayland is Plasma (or Sway, if you are into that).
Cheers, Bennett
Good evening,
Thank you so much for your input; it is really appreciated. For you information, I am using a (kinda old) Acer E1-570G, which has 4GB of RAM and a i5 3337 CPU.
Thanks for the suggestion regarding the Plasma DE, I never heard of it before; I will try to give it a shot, considering XFCE (which was suggested) as possible fallback.
I am also interested in Michael's setup; except for ZRam, did you use anything else?
Thanks again to everyone!
On Wed, 7 Feb 2018 21:28:26 +0100 Giovanni Santini via arch-general arch-general@archlinux.org wrote:
Thanks for the suggestion regarding the Plasma DE, I never heard of it before.
You may know it better by the name KDE.
Il 08/02/2018 00:36, strupo ha scritto:
On Wed, 7 Feb 2018 21:28:26 +0100 Giovanni Santini via arch-general arch-general@archlinux.org wrote:
Thanks for the suggestion regarding the Plasma DE, I never heard of it before.
You may know it better by the name KDE.
Oh. Thanks to point it out. Am I so ignorant in the matter? Doh.
Hello again, Thanks to your suggestions, I decided to 1. Replace GDM with LightDM 2. Install LXDE as lightweight DE The installation was easy and I am really glad of the RAM performance obtained (I suppose GDM was the real resource hog).
These is only one small desire that is still unexpressed for me: I both have mutter and openbox locally installed and I would like to use only mutter (looks much better) when using LXDE. The problem is that I have literally no idea of how to set up its keys; from its man, I should change them from the Control Center, that is not present in LXDE (it's GNOME stuff) and I am not sure of which GNOME settings services I should execute to make it work. If anyone has any tips, please speak ahead!
Thanks again to all, anyways :)
Hi,
Replacing GDM for LightDM was a smart move. (You can make it look like GDM; here's a hand: https://goo.gl/WpMrYg)
If you like GNOME and would still like to use it, I recommend changing vm.swappiness to a higher value (default is 60). In my case I found that changing it to 80 solved most of my unresponsive DE issues - although I use Cinnamon, and I have 8GB of RAM. YMMV.
Regards Marc
On Sun, Feb 11, 2018 at 8:39 PM, Giovanni Santini via arch-general arch-general@archlinux.org wrote:
Hello again, Thanks to your suggestions, I decided to
- Replace GDM with LightDM
- Install LXDE as lightweight DE
The installation was easy and I am really glad of the RAM performance obtained (I suppose GDM was the real resource hog).
These is only one small desire that is still unexpressed for me: I both have mutter and openbox locally installed and I would like to use only mutter (looks much better) when using LXDE. The problem is that I have literally no idea of how to set up its keys; from its man, I should change them from the Control Center, that is not present in LXDE (it's GNOME stuff) and I am not sure of which GNOME settings services I should execute to make it work. If anyone has any tips, please speak ahead!
Thanks again to all, anyways :)
-- Giovanni Santini My blog: http://giovannisantini.tk My code: https://git%7Bhub,lab%7D.com/ItachiSan My GPG: 2FADEBF5
On Mon, 12 Feb 2018 00:47:33 -0200, Marcelo "Marc" Ranolfi wrote:
On Sun, Feb 11, 2018 at 8:39 PM, Giovanni Santini wrote:
Hello again, Thanks to your suggestions, I decided to
- Replace GDM with LightDM
- Install LXDE as lightweight DE
The installation was easy and I am really glad of the RAM performance obtained (I suppose GDM was the real resource hog).
These is only one small desire that is still unexpressed for me: I both have mutter and openbox locally installed and I would like to use only mutter (looks much better) when using LXDE. The problem is that I have literally no idea of how to set up its keys; from its man, I should change them from the Control Center, that is not present in LXDE (it's GNOME stuff) and I am not sure of which GNOME settings services I should execute to make it work. If anyone has any tips, please speak ahead!
Replacing GDM for LightDM was a smart move. (You can make it look like GDM; here's a hand: https://goo.gl/WpMrYg)
If you like GNOME and would still like to use it, I recommend changing vm.swappiness to a higher value (default is 60). In my case I found that changing it to 80 solved most of my unresponsive DE issues - although I use Cinnamon, and I have 8GB of RAM. YMMV.
If a DE requires swapping on a modern machine with 8 GiB of available RAM, than the DE is crap. Since I'm an openbox (no DE at all) user, openbox does look, as the user makes it looking. Perhaps getting rid of the DE, instead of switching the WM helps.
Be careful when clicking shortened links like "goo.gl", they can be phishing tactic linkage.
On Mon, 12 Feb 2018 00:47:33 -0200 "Marcelo "Marc" Ranolfi via arch-general" arch-general@archlinux.org wrote:
Hi,
Replacing GDM for LightDM was a smart move. (You can make it look like GDM; here's a hand: https://goo.gl/WpMrYg)
If you like GNOME and would still like to use it, I recommend changing vm.swappiness to a higher value (default is 60). In my case I found that changing it to 80 solved most of my unresponsive DE issues - although I use Cinnamon, and I have 8GB of RAM. YMMV.
Regards Marc
On Sun, Feb 11, 2018 at 8:39 PM, Giovanni Santini via arch-general arch-general@archlinux.org wrote:
Hello again, Thanks to your suggestions, I decided to
- Replace GDM with LightDM
- Install LXDE as lightweight DE
The installation was easy and I am really glad of the RAM performance obtained (I suppose GDM was the real resource hog).
These is only one small desire that is still unexpressed for me: I both have mutter and openbox locally installed and I would like to use only mutter (looks much better) when using LXDE. The problem is that I have literally no idea of how to set up its keys; from its man, I should change them from the Control Center, that is not present in LXDE (it's GNOME stuff) and I am not sure of which GNOME settings services I should execute to make it work. If anyone has any tips, please speak ahead!
Thanks again to all, anyways :)
-- Giovanni Santini My blog: http://giovannisantini.tk My code: https://git%7Bhub,lab%7D.com/ItachiSan My GPG: 2FADEBF5
Sorry freq (unless you are an automated message); here's the full link: https://drive.google.com/file/d/1KS5Iy0OJ6UHWeoAN2WSBelHn6ZWjoUKT/view
@Ralf Mardorf: Of course the DE doesn't. When I boot up to my desktop, my RAM usage is just under 1GB for Cinnamon + LightDM. Which is very fair for a modern x64 system. But thing is, I'm usually running a couple of virtual machines and browser windows and bulding something at the same time. (Yeah, I should get more RAM). ;)
Regards
On Mon, Feb 12, 2018 at 5:04 AM, freq via arch-general arch-general@archlinux.org wrote:
Be careful when clicking shortened links like "goo.gl", they can be phishing tactic linkage.
On Mon, 12 Feb 2018 00:47:33 -0200 "Marcelo "Marc" Ranolfi via arch-general" arch-general@archlinux.org wrote:
Hi,
Replacing GDM for LightDM was a smart move. (You can make it look like GDM; here's a hand: https://goo.gl/WpMrYg)
If you like GNOME and would still like to use it, I recommend changing vm.swappiness to a higher value (default is 60). In my case I found that changing it to 80 solved most of my unresponsive DE issues - although I use Cinnamon, and I have 8GB of RAM. YMMV.
Regards Marc
On Sun, Feb 11, 2018 at 8:39 PM, Giovanni Santini via arch-general arch-general@archlinux.org wrote:
Hello again, Thanks to your suggestions, I decided to
- Replace GDM with LightDM
- Install LXDE as lightweight DE
The installation was easy and I am really glad of the RAM performance obtained (I suppose GDM was the real resource hog).
These is only one small desire that is still unexpressed for me: I both have mutter and openbox locally installed and I would like to use only mutter (looks much better) when using LXDE. The problem is that I have literally no idea of how to set up its keys; from its man, I should change them from the Control Center, that is not present in LXDE (it's GNOME stuff) and I am not sure of which GNOME settings services I should execute to make it work. If anyone has any tips, please speak ahead!
Thanks again to all, anyways :)
-- Giovanni Santini My blog: http://giovannisantini.tk My code: https://git%7Bhub,lab%7D.com/ItachiSan My GPG: 2FADEBF5
-- freq freq@lavabit.com
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