Dropped frames in dock slide out animation when the dock is hidden

[dpavlic]

From time to time the animation to bring the dock out when it is hidden stutters and lags (it appears to be dropping frames). This is on an admittedly very low end Toshiba 2 Chromebook Celeron, but I don't experience these issues with any stock GNOME 3 animations: it also doesn't happen all of the time with the extension either. Usually it happens over time I have GNOME 3 running and I can 'fix' it by restarting the GNOME session, but this is of course not ideal.

This affects me in the last dash-to-dock version and also the master. I have not checked if the issue occurs in the previous versions. The behaviour is also observed even if dash-to-dock is the only extension running.

[micheleg]

Thanks for the bug report. Unfortunately animations are not always that smooth on Gnome shell. There's not much that can be done easily though.

[ghost]

The similar bug appears to affect me even though it's on GTX 1070.
It only happens if the intelligent auto-hide is enabled: the animation that brings the dock out and hides it, causes unbelievably huge lag spikes when switching between windows on two separate desktops.

Even if the Mutter (with reverting https://git.gnome.org/browse/mutter/commit/?h=gnome-3-24&id=383ba566bd7c2a76d0856015a66e47caedef06b6) patch specifically made for NVIDIA blob users to utilize their GPUs capabilities finer is applied, it doesn't reduce stuttering much in this case.

The only 'fix' is to disable the intelligent auto-hide feature. In a contrast to this, all other system animations are butter-smooth.

[micheleg]

Thanks for the report. Unfortunately this is difficult to debug without an affected system. You say that the animation lags when you move from one workspace to another. Is the animation ok when you just trigger the dock showing with the mouse?

Could you plese try tinkering with the settings to see if by any change they affect the performance? I'm thinking in particular to the workspace/monitor isolation, the dock placement, the styling options.

Can you confirm if you always had this issue or if it occurs from a specific GNOME Shell or extension version?

Are you able to confirm if the issue only occur with the nvidia gpu (i.e., if you hava an integrated one and you could ceck with that)?

[ghost]

Hi! Thanks for the quick response!

So, to be more exact, it lags when I move from one workspace to another only if windows dodging is enabled, otherwise it's just fine. The animation also stutters a little bit when I bring the dock out by triggering it with the mouse (window dodging disabled).

Using either GNOME keybindings (SUPER+Home/End|ALT+Tab), or the SUPER+number function in the Dash to Panel extension to switch from one to another cause the lag (it's worth of mentioning that I disabled the same function in Dash to Dock, so they don't collide with each other).

I've just run some test with various settings configurations, and it looks like that the dock out and hiding animations cause the framerate drop. Neither the size, or other tweaks like shrinking the dash, disabling opacity etc. affect the performance or help.
Running this extension only doesn't solve the issue either: the only difference is I have to switch to another workspaces by using GNOME keybindings.

The animations also seem to affect performance when triggering the dock hiding and showing by dragging a window onto it.
However, the lag is still the most noticeable when switching from one workspace to another.

I installed GNOME Shell yesterday, hence I can't provide any information whether it affects this specific version only.

Oh, I apologize. I forgot to provide the basic information about my desktop:
Freshly updated Arch Linux with GNOME 3.24.2;
NVIDIA Driver 384.59-5;
The extension was downloaded from the extension store.

[ghost]

Note: The overall lag in the GNOME shell was so huge and noticeable that I had to restart GNOME by the "r" command. At the moment, the lag caused by the Dock is subtle/moderate, but it still affects the performance. I also noticed that the frequenter I hop between workspace, the lag is more subtle. However, it may be GNOME shell bug - I don't know that for sure.

Edit: Gnome Shell slowed down a bit, and the dock is noticeably affecting the performance again.

[xvzf]

Hi,

Just a quick update, I was able to reproduce it on my notebook - i5-7200U, iGPU but NOT on my i7-8700k, iGPU. That leads me thinking if there is any "performance optimization in battery mode" going on. I haven't looked at the code though!

It was the same SSD in both systems containing an ArchLinux installation with linux 4.17.x-ck and Gnome 3.28.2

[corebots]

this issue remains on latest Gnome 3.36.2 - when dock is hidden and one enters/exits the overview, the overview animation stutters.

[parthrd]

I had the same issue as @corebots on GNOME 3.36.2 (Wayland). A workaround which seems to work for me is reducing the Animation duration under Intelligent autohide to 0.1s or 0.05s from the default 0.2s (or even 0s if you do not care about animations). This ensures that the dock comes in place before the overview animation is completed, and does not interfere there.

However, in either case, a hidden dock definitely interferes with the new unlock animation in GNOME 3.36, which stutters as the dock frantically tries to hide itself whenever logging in or unlocking the screen.

[vanvugt]

A lot has happened in the years since this was reported. Does anyone experience the bug in Ubuntu 22.04 or later?