Weird Stutter and Lag

General system Newbie
1

Hey everyone,

I’ve started encountering another issue where my PC lags and it’s not smooth at all, often when browsing. I’ve a fairly decent and modern computer, so it can handle a bunch of browser instances.

Not sure what’s causing the issue but any insights on what to look out for when the issue happens? It isn’t permanent but really annoying when it does occur.

The cursor movement lags along with the general app UI - to be more specific. I’ve encountered this in my browsers (Firefox and Chrome) and while using Neovim in the terminal (kitty).

If you need any details, please do let me know and I’ll happily provide. Would love to get this sorted.

I recorded a screencast for convenience. Apologies for the bad quality, I used the stock GNOME utility.

Link: https://streamable.com/smnd78

Information about my PC: https://0x0.st/XbJR.txt

Cheers.

2

Oh wow that looks pretty painful. Are you running in a Wayland session? (if so, log-out and log-in using X11 and test again).

3

Thanks for the reply, it really is.

I’ve switched to X11 due to the flickering issues.

4

It’s a known issue with Nvidia under Wayland. A fix is on the way (in Nvidia drivers 555).

There are apparently some workarounds you can try in the meantime, some have had success with. @xircon mentioned some here.

5

Oh hang on, that’s your topic!

Is the issue persisting under X11?

6

The flickering is gone, that’s not a problem anymore.

I’m experiencing these weird stutters and lag which is quite annoying.

Yes, it is. I created a new one since this is a different problem now.

7

Please clarify, are these issues presenting under X11, or Wayland?

8

Sorry for the confusion.

The above recording is on X11, so these issues are occurring on X11.

1 Like
9

:sweat_smile:

Sorry for charging off down the wrong path then, but I’m glad that’s cleared up.

Did you end up implementing @xircon’s fixes? I’m not sure if they’d cause issues under X11 (I’ve not tried them).

10

No worries.

The only fix I tried from @xircon was enabling a Chrome flag, which I’ve reverted since switching to X11.

It did fix the issue on Chrome but there were still some edge cases apparently.

11

I’m wondering if this could be somehow related to the integrated AMD card on my board.

Would uninstalling the amdgpu be useful in this scenario?

01:00.0 VGA compatible controller: NVIDIA Corporation GA104 [GeForce RTX 3070 Lite Hash Rate] (rev a1)
	Subsystem: Gigabyte Technology Co., Ltd Device 404c
	Kernel driver in use: nvidia
--
11:00.0 VGA compatible controller: Advanced Micro Devices, Inc. [AMD/ATI] Raphael (rev c7)
	Subsystem: ASUSTeK Computer Inc. Device 8877
	Kernel driver in use: amdgpu
12

Try turning off hardware acceleration in your browsers and see if there is a difference.

For kitty, that’s the whole reason for using it, so I doubt it can be turned off, but you could try a non-hardware-accelerated terminal with Neovim to see if you still have the issue.

If the issues stop, then it probably means there is some possible firmware issue — maybe a BIOS update or drivers? Or switching to a different kernel?

13

Thanks for the reply.

I have the LTS kernel installed, and BIOS are up-to date as well as the drivers (running the latest 550.90 drivers). I’m not sure how much hardware acceleration will help since the issue is not only limited to the browsers, but I shall give it a shot.

In the meantime, I tried using wayland instead of X11 to see if the problem persists. Not entirely sure, but I believe the stutters or lag have not yet occurred. However, I have encountered two total system freezes. No matter how long I waited, it remained and I had to restart my PC to get it back working.

For context, I encounter these issues while trying to work on some projects. I have Neovim running, along with a node server for the project (using pnpm), and a browser.

Additionally, my setup is a dual-boot with Windows which I primarily use for gaming. Are there any logs that I can share which can shed more light on these problems?

Thank you for the help.

14

You’ve already provided logs. The thing you can test is to watch your system processes while you are using the apps that lag often to see what’s happening.

1 Like