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I have high cpu use in Ubuntu 19.04, and my screen seems laggy.

Watching top I see gnome-shell running about 50% very often.

pomsky
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Charles Green
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    I'm having the same problem even when I deactivate all the extensions ... this is particularly annoying as I'm on a laptop and it makes the fans spin up all the time and reduces baterry lmife ... – Dennis de Best May 29 '19 at 12:34

1 Answers1

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The new version of gnome-shell is not compatible with some extensions. In particular those trying to show systray, such as "TopIcons Plus" are not working well.

Disable extensions (one-by-one?) to see if this reduces CPU usage.

To do this, install the gnome-tweaks package.

Open tweaks, check the extensions tab on the left, and disable extensions on the right (shown below, POP_OS, but should be similar/identical in other flavors of Ubuntu):

Screenshot of gnome-shell application showing disabled topicons plus extension

An alternative to TopIcons Plus which seems to catch most of the systray devices is "KStatusNotifierItem/AppIndicator Support"

PatKilg
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Charles Green
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    Wow! I can toggle TopIcons on and off and watch gnome-shell CPU use go from ~10% of a core to 99%. – PatKilg May 30 '19 at 16:23
  • @ZachBloomquist You will notice here that users of 'TopIcons Redux' are in fact suffering from this bug, on Gnome shell 3.32 – Charles Green May 31 '19 at 16:23
  • @ZachBloomquist It will be great if 3.32.1 has fixed the issue - the version of gnome shell in the Ubuntu repositories is still 3.32.0 – Charles Green May 31 '19 at 16:29
  • @CharlesGreen you're right, it's still broken, the issue has returned after sleeping/waking the computer – Zach Bloomquist May 31 '19 at 17:55
  • Here is a comment that tells you how to temporarily patch the bug until a new GNOME version is released: https://gitlab.com/pop-planet/TopIcons-Redux/issues/12#note_166510493 – Zach Bloomquist Jun 04 '19 at 13:41
  • @ZachBloomquist I'll give that a shot in a VM - have you tried it yet? – Charles Green Jun 04 '19 at 14:26
  • @CharlesGreen I have, it does seem to help somewhat - my laptop fans are no longer running at 100% all the time. gnome-shell still uses a decent chunk of CPU but it's not pegged to 100% all the time, which IIRC is how it was before this bug – Zach Bloomquist Jun 04 '19 at 15:00
  • @ZachBloomquist I ran this in my VM and it does seem to fix the problem that I encountered. My concern is that this is basically added in as a hack, and it's up to me as the OP, to watch for changes to Gnome-Shell, and revert the fix as required. – Charles Green Jun 04 '19 at 15:16
  • @ZachBloomquist Currently I'm using "KStatusNotifierItem/AppIndicator Support" for moving icons to the top - there's only one app that is giving me trouble (Liferea) and it's really not much of an issue for me. – Charles Green Jun 04 '19 at 15:18
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    Just checking back in, 3.32.2 does seem to fix the issue and it's available from apt. – Zach Bloomquist Jul 08 '19 at 15:38