running Manjaro KDE with 5.10.2-2 kernel and Plasma 5.20.4 on Lenovo Legion 5. The laptop has 4800H amd cpu, 32GB of RAM and NVME drive. I constantly run 3 browsers: firefox, chrome and brave all at the same time with a bunch of tabs. After a day or so of constant usage, browsers start to lag very very hard, and the websites they’re displaying start to flicker on scroll. It all disappears once I restart all of them. RAM never goes above 11GB, so wtf is going on? First I thought it was the Renoir GPU, but the very same thing occurs when using dedicated Nvidia 1650 GPU with 455 driver. Have tried disabling hardware acceleration on all 3 of them as well… I’m clueless now, any ideas?
I don’t know what would cause this but unless you are capable of continuous web surfing without sleep for more than a couple of days - my guess is you are using hibernate or sleep functionality. This functionality can be tricky - I never got it to work - in any case you are better off not using it.
With your system specs you wont notice the difference so configure your browsers to pickup where you left and do a complete shutdown/power-off on your system when not in use.
Not using any hibernate or sleep functionality. Laptop never gets shut down, it’s on 24/7. Obviously I don’t surf 24h a day, but I do a lot of trading, and have always some alerts set up.
Well - it’s hard to say - one would think a memory leak somewhere - if it was a server I would be worried - a workstation - reboot.
No software is flawless especially not browsers - which is why they are updated quite often - one even invented the term ever-green for often updated software
But as it - if I understood correctly - happens cross browser - someone like me would immediately suspect the hardware - but that is probably due to my bias against AMD corp.
Well, I never tried Windows on it. Now I must. If the same happens it might very well be something hardware related. Very odd, never seen something like this. If there were a mem leak, wouldn’t I see it in abnormal RAM increase?
All I can say about this is, good luck! From experience, when using Windoze, my browser became unuseable after about 6/7 hours.
And a friend regularly ran out of RAM when using Windoze, and he has 32GB of RAM.
I’m going to be honest with you. Restart the poor machine every once in a while. Shut it down when you go to bed. It’s not a server in an atmosphere-controlled environment, and it was never even designed for that. Never mind working 24/7 in a sweatshop.
Shutting down is not an option ever, because of those alarms. I feel the same way about Windows, it’s such a piece of sh…, didn’t use it in ages, but I must see how it behaves.
Then you need to double your hardware - running the same apps on both - when one reboots the other is available.
Also consider something other than AMD - personally I would never consider AMD an option - even less when it comes to mission critical systems which requires 99.99% uptime.
Well, then seeing as you said it works fine again if you restart the browser, you can always set a cronjob to kill the browser, say just before you get up in the morning, and start them again a minute or two later. You can set any webpages that has to open as the home page with passwords saved. (Yeah, I know it’s not secure, but your situation is…unique. And besides, you can have your screen locked.)
Crontab could work. Thank you both for taking the time to help me. I will report in a day or two how it goes with Windows, since the laptop is built around it. This is my first AMD CPU since 2004. If this turns out to be hardware related, i’m done with AMD.
Well, it’s been 1d:18h of uptime on Windows. I’m totally surprised now. No issues whatsoever on Windows. No signs of lagging at all… What is even more surprising to me: Web browsing on Windows is much more smooth, and I hammered it even more with 16GB of RAM usage all the time. On arch I notice micro stuttering while moving and zooming Charts on TradingView from the start, on any given browser, which eventually gets to the unusable point… So what to do now? I can’t use Windows for sure… Could it be KDE’s fault here? Or maybe GPU drivers? I was planning to sit in Windows for 1 or 2 days more just to be sure, and than try something Debian based, like Pop Os?
I’m also having weird browser issues (firefox) and dolphin. With only a couple of tabs it sometimes gets real laggy and youtube video just stops but the audio continues. This only happens when I’m using ManjaroKDE since the 12-31 update but never on my Manjaro-i3 install.
I’ll definitely try other Desktop env then. Problematic to me is, that only KDE is visually appealing to me, I hate everything else. Also I use Kate and Dolphin heavily, which have weird theming on other env’s.
Try to disable compositing, by default KDE uses your GPU to draw.
Also make sure you disable baloo file indexer (in KDE settings as well), it eats a lot of resources.
Lastly check system logs.
1d 17h uptime on Manjaro KDE. Disabled compositing and indexing. Issue seems to be gone. No more lagging, browsers run normal. Very interesting to me is that RAM usage sits at 7GB. Previously it would have grown to 11-12 GB by now. The issue which I described, regarding browsing smoothness still persists. Windows is still much much smoother. I will definitely test other Desktop env’s to see whether this is Linux wide or KDE only. Thanks for solving my problem.
Update: just booted into Pop os. Browsing is far worse than in Manjaro KDE (unbelievable amount of choppiness) with exactly the same browser setup. On Manjarro it’s very acceptable, but noticeable in regards to Windows. Will be sticking to Manjaro KDE, as this is not so bad to be a deal breaker for me. I just can’t wrap my head around that Windows is better in Web browsing than Linux.
This also.