Cinnamon desktop lagging, spiking CPU every other second
Lately my Cinnamon desktop environment (running on Linux Mint 18.2) has been a bit… laggy. Mouse movement is 100% fine; however every scrolling, window-moving, highlighting, video playing (as it seems to me, things that update window content) causes 100% CPU spikes on one core for half a second, repeating with 1-2 sec period, freezing whatever I was doing. Disk usage stays low during it. This also causes videos to desynchronize with their sound. Needless to say, it’s extremely annoying. Between the lags it works as it should.
My computer should handle Cinnamon well – Linux is installed on an SSD (though some directories, like ~HOME, are on an HDD), I have 4GB RAM and an i5 3.2gHz CPU, and running from a Raedon 5770 GPU (built-in driver). My inxi tells:
ezio@Cantabury ~/Downloads $ inxi -F
System: Host: Cantabury Kernel: 4.10.0-32-generic x86_64 (64 bit) Desktop: Cinnamon 3.4.6
Distro: Linux Mint 18.2 Sonya
Machine: Mobo: ASRock model: H87M Pro4 Bios: American Megatrends v: P2.00 date: 12/06/2013
CPU: Quad core Intel Core i5-4440 (-MCP-) cache: 6144 KB
clock speeds: max: 3300 MHz 1: 2711 MHz 2: 2599 MHz 3: 2692 MHz 4: 2573 MHz
Graphics: Card: Advanced Micro Devices [AMD/ATI] Juniper XT [Radeon HD 5770]
Display Server: X.Org 1.18.4 drivers: ati,radeon (unloaded: fbdev,vesa)
Resolution: 1920x1080@60.00hz
GLX Renderer: Gallium 0.4 on AMD JUNIPER (DRM 2.49.0 / 4.10.0-32-generic, LLVM 4.0.0)
GLX Version: 3.0 Mesa 17.0.7
Audio: Card-1 Intel 8 Series/C220 Series High Definition Audio Controller driver: snd_hda_intel
Card-2 Advanced Micro Devices [AMD/ATI] Juniper HDMI Audio [Radeon HD 5700 Series]
driver: snd_hda_intel
Sound: Advanced Linux Sound Architecture v: k4.10.0-32-generic
Network: Card: Intel Ethernet Connection I217-V driver: e1000e
IF: enp0s25 state: up speed: 1000 Mbps duplex: full mac: bc:5f:f4:ab:e1:39
Drives: HDD Total Size: 1901.6GB (1.6% used) ID-1: /dev/sda model: Samsung_SSD_840 size: 120.0GB
ID-2: /dev/sdb model: WDC_WD10EZEX size: 1000.2GB
ID-3: /dev/sdc model: SAMSUNG_HD753LJ size: 750.2GB
ID-4: USB /dev/sdd model: Storage_Device size: 31.2GB
Partition: ID-1: / size: 20G used: 9.5G (52%) fs: ext4 dev: /dev/sda3
ID-2: /home size: 46G used: 6.4G (15%) fs: ext4 dev: /dev/sdb3
ID-3: swap-1 size: 4.09GB used: 0.19GB (5%) fs: swap dev: /dev/sdb5
RAID: No RAID devices: /proc/mdstat, md_mod kernel module present
Sensors: System Temperatures: cpu: 38.0C mobo: N/A gpu: 37.0
Fan Speeds (in rpm): cpu: N/A
Info: Processes: 226 Uptime: 15:19 Memory: 2554.5/3866.3MB Client: Shell (bash) inxi: 2.2.35
Apparently, it’s Cinnamon itself. It’s a bit hard to capture the spike while also causing it, but Cinnamon’s CPU usage increases to 40-60% during them, while no other process changes.
PID USER PR NI VIRT RES SHR S %CPU %MEM TIME+ COMMAND
1719 ezio 20 0 2587952 600112 50384 S 16,3 15,2 137:58.43 cinnamon
983 root 20 0 283508 7944 5652 S 1,7 0,2 18:45.15 polkitd
19103 ezio 20 0 3388232 787320 148876 S 1,7 19,9 16:42.69 Web Content
1259 root 20 0 477696 128816 95528 S 1,0 3,3 9:09.57 Xorg
798 message+ 20 0 44196 4416 3128 S 0,7 0,1 7:41.66 dbus-daemon
840 root 20 0 450548 11984 10408 S 0,7 0,3 8:10.89 NetworkManager
25137 ezio 20 0 499564 40600 24392 S 0,7 1,0 0:08.13 gnome-terminal-
19052 ezio 20 0 3090968 688212 189464 S 0,3 17,4 14:53.08 firefox
What could be the solution?
Edit: In my journalct -e output, three lines caught my unprofesional eye:
Aug 30 19:17:01 Cantabury CRON[18289]: pam_unix(cron:session): session closed for user root
Aug 30 19:20:37 Cantabury cinnamon-screensaver-pam-helper[18398]: pam_ecryptfs: seteuid error
Aug 30 19:20:37 Cantabury cinnamon-screensaver-pam-helper[18398]: gkr-pam: the password for the login keyring was invalid.
Now that I see this, I recall gettingt a prompt several times complaining about the login keyring, asking for a password. I didn’t know that password (it wasn’t my user pw == the root pw), so just minimized/closed it.
I asked this question first on the Linux Mint Forum, where mr_raider provided the solution.
All credits go to him.
The problem was caused by the default AMD drivers. The solution is installing an updated version, the oibaf AMD drivers. The procedure:
sudo add-apt-repository ppa:oibaf/graphics-drivers
sudo apt update
sudo apt upgrade
After this and a reboot, the lag is no more.
The forum thread is available there:
[SOLVED] Cinnamon lagging, causing CPU spikes every other second
I also had this problem after updating to Mint 18.3
I have NVidia, and tried updating my drivers, but it didn’t help. For me it was the new driver (in my case 340.106) that was the problem.
Once I reverted to 340.104 everything seems to be amazing again.
I just wanted to post unless anyone else is having the same issue.
Thanks
You can also try logging out and logging in with Software Rendering disabled.
What worked for me (Nvidia) was going into my misc settings and disabling Vscync. fixing the screen tearing is easy. open the nvidia control panel. Display config. Show advanced and force full rendering pipeline. do this for all your monitors. made it super smooth