extension causes Gnome Overview to lag extremely

[wmertens]

Describe the bug

Triggering the gnome overview is normally a smooth experience. However, with GSConnect enabled, it becomes laggy and stuttery if not used in a while.

It's as if a lot of memory needs to be paged in to show the overview.

After the initial load it's smooth for a short while.

Steps to reproduce

1. verify that overview is smooth
2. enable gsconnect
3. wait a few minutes, use applications
4. trigger overview

Expected behavior

5. everything remains smooth

GSConnect version

I can't find it, latest from extensions website

Installed from

GNOME Extensions website

GNOME Shell version

44

Linux distribution/release

nixos unstable

Paired device(s)

Pixel 7

KDE Connect app version

23.04.3

Plugin(s)

No response

Support log

No response

Screenshots

No response

Notes

No response

[ferdnyc]

@wmertens

Hmm. I can't immediately reproduce, but my main system has a lot of RAM.

A couple of suggestions:

1. Check your user journal (journalctl --user -e to start at the end), make sure GSConnect isn't furiously logging, either due to JS errors or because it's gotten stuck in debug mode (which is very noisy).
2. If you think it's a memory issue, check its usage.

The top command will show virtual (VIRT), resident (RSS), and shared (SHR) memory consumption in the default view, in addition to the percentage-of-total-memory (%MEM) counter. You can ignore VIRT as totally imaginary. (Chrome on my system regularly registers over 100GB of VIRT consumption. The machine has 16GB of RAM.) SHR rarely grows very large. RSS is the critical number, though %MEM is also informative.

This command will focus top by restricting the display to just the gnome-shell process and any gjs instances running on the system (up to three of which may be gsconnect-related — four, if the settings window is also open):

top -p $(pidof -S, gjs),$(pidof gnome-shell)