You are not logged in.

#1 2013-07-28 17:42:34

Pyrobisqit
Member
Registered: 2011-05-26
Posts: 23

GNOME 3 acting funny when using RAM heavily

Hi,

I've been noticing that when I open many tabs in Chromium (and thus, being a very memory intensive app, it puts a lot of load into the RAM) GNOME 3 starts acting funny. Letters from labels disappear, such as the top bar menues are gone. The overall UI seems to work fine, except rounded corners and basically any letter in the Shell interface (Metacity labels and inner window content work fine).

This is a freshly installed system. 16 GB of swap and around 8 GB of RAM, so plenty of room for Chromium to have hundreds of tabs anyways. My graphics card is a 8800 GTS, with less than 256 MB (which could also be the issue).

But seriously, this is why I hate GNOME Shell so much. It looks alpha state! These kinds of bugs should not happen in a production environment hmm

What can I do to help me troubleshoot the source? Any quick and dirty hacks?

I'll probably end up switching GNOME with Xfce if this keeps up like this sad

Last edited by Pyrobisqit (2013-07-30 13:09:57)

Offline

#2 2013-07-29 02:13:44

Pse
Member
Registered: 2008-03-15
Posts: 413

Re: GNOME 3 acting funny when using RAM heavily

How much free RAM is available when this starts happening? 8GB is a lot of RAM to fill with tabs. And even then, you have swap, so you shouldn't miss anything. This looks like some sort of bug. Are you sure this is Gnome's fault? It may be triggering a bug somewhere else.

Last edited by Pse (2013-07-29 02:14:33)

Offline

#3 2013-07-29 11:32:54

Pyrobisqit
Member
Registered: 2011-05-26
Posts: 23

Re: GNOME 3 acting funny when using RAM heavily

Pse wrote:

How much free RAM is available when this starts happening? 8GB is a lot of RAM to fill with tabs. And even then, you have swap, so you shouldn't miss anything. This looks like some sort of bug. Are you sure this is Gnome's fault? It may be triggering a bug somewhere else.

I'm pretty sure it's Gnome's fault, however, I'm unable to replicate this.

I know it's Gnome's fault because, although not corrupting the labels again, the system feels somehow slower from time to time, in a direct relationship to how many Chromium tabs there are open (which was what caused the bug in the beginning) or otherwise, how many different app windows (so it's not just Chromium, but the whole system).

Could my system become slower when the RAM is 85% full than when it is only 25% full? Does that even make sense? Assuming swap is not being used (I have set it up so that it's only being used when RAM is 90% full or more).

Offline

#4 2013-07-30 13:04:05

Pyrobisqit
Member
Registered: 2011-05-26
Posts: 23

Re: GNOME 3 acting funny when using RAM heavily

I have been experiencing this for the last days. There is definitely something wrong with Chromium, which, when closed, makes text in GNOME Shell appear again, like magic. Some icons are also gone from the UI. I really don't know what's going on, and I don't know how to backtrace it, in order to file a proper bugreport...

Offline

#5 2013-07-30 18:36:17

Pse
Member
Registered: 2008-03-15
Posts: 413

Re: GNOME 3 acting funny when using RAM heavily

Just to start ruling things out, could you please try with some other graphics driver? If you're using nvidia's proprietary ones, switch temporarily to noveau or vesa and check if you can reproduce the problem. I'm running Chromium on Gnome (Intel GPU) and I can't reproduce it.

Last edited by Pse (2013-07-30 18:36:39)

Offline

#6 2013-07-30 18:50:01

Pyrobisqit
Member
Registered: 2011-05-26
Posts: 23

Re: GNOME 3 acting funny when using RAM heavily

That is a very smart idea. Is there a way to keep the Nvidia driver installed, but blacklisted, and install nouveau (vesa doesn't support 3D, therefore I'd fall back to classic GNOME), forcing pacman to keep both installed side-by-side?

Or otherwise, is there a way to uninstall Nvidia and then quickly install nouveau without having to remove the whole Xorg suite?

Offline

#7 2013-07-31 19:59:09

Pse
Member
Registered: 2008-03-15
Posts: 413

Re: GNOME 3 acting funny when using RAM heavily

You can tell pacman to ignore dependencies when uninstalling the nvidia driver. That way you can later install nouveau. This is the easiest way to do it, IMO. To tell pacman to ignore dependencies use:

pacman -Rdd <package>

Be careful when removing packages this way. All dependent packages will be broken until you reinstall whatever dependencies are missing, that is, in this case, until you install nouveau.

BTW, you can use vesa and launch the full Gnome Shell (no fallback) by using the llvmpipe driver. I think this happens automatically nowadays; mesa falls back to llvmpipe when there is no hardware driver.

Last edited by Pse (2013-07-31 20:00:17)

Offline

#8 2013-08-01 06:19:26

jrussell
Member
From: Cape Town, South Africa
Registered: 2012-08-16
Posts: 510

Re: GNOME 3 acting funny when using RAM heavily


bitcoin: 1G62YGRFkMDwhGr5T5YGovfsxLx44eZo7U

Offline

Board footer

Powered by FluxBB