Over the last year I have noticed that my PC is snappy with Gnome-shell until a certain amount. After that the user interface get slugish (scrolling down windows, going to the "Activities" overview, switching between windows etc.)
Normally, I've got some programs open, but nothing that warrants this behavior. For example: currently I've got Firefox open (12 tabs), Chromium (1 tab), Nautilus, the System Monitor and Filezilla. The interesting thing is that i have got lots of free memory (currently 5gb) and the CPU's aren't very busy (20%-30%). Firefox uses most (between 5-10%)
I have the idea that it is related to the interface. Processes that are not related to the desktop environment still work fine (i.e. Handbrake will encode on full speed). So, I'm wondering if this is related to the video driver. I currently have an Nvidia video card (proprietary drivers installed), however, I had the same problem with my older ATI card (open source drivers).
My current PC is an:
Phenom II X4 3ghz
8Gb memory
Geforce 8600GTS 1gb
I'm currently running Ubuntu 13.04 with Gnome-shell installed on top. However I had the same problem with Gnome-Ubuntu (remix) and with earlier Ubuntu versions. Gnome-shell version is 3.6.3.1
Any help getting my system feeling snappy with multiple programs running is greatly appreciated!
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