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Luctins
Asked: 2020-03-27 10:01:36 +0800 CST

Is it effective to decrease Gnome Shell's nice?

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I'm having some problems where GNOME Shell freezes because of a application (usually Firefox or discordapp).

Does decreasing its nice value to something around -1 prevent freezing even when under high load from some application?

My main goal is raising the desktop responsiveness under load.

System info:

lsb_release -a
No LSB modules are available.
Distributor ID: Ubuntu
Description:    Ubuntu 18.04.4 LTS
Release:    18.04
Codename:   bionic

hardware: https://www.asus.com/Laptops/ASUS-VivoBook-15-X510UR/specifications/ + a 250 GB M.2 SSD

extensions:

ls  .local/share/gnome-shell/extensions/
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also may be of note that I have no swap.

gnome-shell nice 18.04

1 Answers

  1. Best Answer

    I'd add a swap file before trying an alteration of nice.

    https://help.ubuntu.com/community/SwapFaq recomends having a swapfile or swap partition even if you have plenty of RAM, and the absence of swap space frequently causes freezes. Please generate a swap file, unless you use btrfs, in which case, a swap partition is recommended.

    1g in the following line is the size of the swap file. You may change its size. 1GiB is the file name; if you change it in one place, change it everywhere in the following commands.

    sudo fallocate -l 1g /mnt/1GiB.swap && sudo chmod 600 /mnt/1GiB.swap 
sudo mkswap /mnt/1GiB.swap && sudo swapon /mnt/1GiB.swap
echo '/mnt/1GiB.swap swap swap defaults 0 0' | sudo tee -a /etc/fstab

    However, if this is ineffective at solving that issue, you can change nice values for apps permanently. Set the default nice value of a particular user or group in the /etc/security/limits.conf file.

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