[arch-general] Tips for a stable GNOME Shell?

[Florijan Hamzic]

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 at 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:
> 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.
>
> --
> Giovanni Santini
> My blog: http://giovannisantini.tk
> My code: https://git{hub,lab}.com/ItachiSan
> My GPG: 2FADEBF5
>