System massively slows down after a few minutes of use
Hello.
I'm using Bazzite desktop gnome NVIDIA stable. I'm using an AMD Ryzen 3 3100, a NVIDIA GeForce GTX 1660, and a MSI B450 Gaming Plus Max Mobo.
I believe since the latest NVIDIA driver Flatpak updates my system works normally but after 5 minutes (or less) of use it massively slows down. Some processes (such as Firefox and gnome-shell) report using a CPU usage % above 100 while the slowdown is happening and then about 10-15 minutes later (sometimes sooner) the slowdown ceases for about 5 minutes only to be massively slowed down again.
I tried booting a Ubuntu live CD to back up my entire disks in case I have to reinstall Bazzite (or worst case scenario: move to another Distro) which uses the NV drivers on Wayland and surprise surprise, I didn't have any slowdowns in 3 hours of use.
I tried using Xorg instead of Wayland and the same problem still happens. This is clearly a bug, and it appears to be related to video drivers (possibly the Flatpak ones) but I'm not an expert so I can't exactly pinpoint what's going wrong. I don't even know if this is possibly the Flatpak drivers and not the ones in Bazzite. My system us fully updated.
So my questions are: is there a way to roll back NVIDIA drivers in Bazzite? Is there a way to uninstall the NVIDIA drivers in Bazzite so that I can temporarily use NV and see if the problem fixes itself at least temporarily? Are there any risks in downgrade the Flatpak NVIDIA drivers while using a more recent NVIDIA driver from Bazzite?
I would appreciate some help with this issue since my PC has become mostly unusable.
Thank you for your time.
8 Replies
I forgot to mention. I also did a full memory scan with memtest86+ and my 4x 8 GB ram sticks appear to have no errors. Furthermore, I tried using every RAM stick individually and this didn't fix the issue. I removed and reattached my CPU and the problem still persists. My CPU doesn't appear to provide integrated graphics so I couldn't test with a non-NVIDIA system and I don't own a second graphics card. Still, if the system appears to work well with NV (as opposed to the proprietary video drivers) I assume it's a software issue.
Either way, I'm lost, and I don't really know what to do to fix this.
Another thing I just tried:
I forgot to mention. I don't have any layered packages right now. I removed all virtualization packages and I also ran
rpm-ostree reset, didn't fix the issue.Lets see if a recent update caused your issue. You can use the following command in the terminal to rollback to a version of Bazzite from a month ago.
bazzite-rollback-helper rebase stable-40.20240922.0 alternatively, you might have better luck with the nvidia closed source driver where you can type the following to try that bazzite-rollback-helper rebase bazzite-gnome-nvidia:stableOh I forgot to mention that. I did roll back to a previous image but this didn't fix the issue.
I think I finally fixed it. Or at least, it seems my PC hasn't slowed down in over 1 hour which is a massive improvement but I'd need to wait a few more hours and see if this problem persists. If by tomorrow my PC does not slow down, I will post another message and mark this as resolved. Otherwise, I'll also post here.
So, I use the "Vitals" GNOME extension. When I disabled all extensions, my computer didn't slow down. Then I tried to find out which extension was causing the issues. It looks like it was Vitals. But then I remembered I ran
sudo sensors-detect less than 48 hours ago (can't remember when exactly) answering yes to all prompts. So I checked the man pages, found the sensors config file /etc/sensors3.conf, deleted it, rebooted, and everything seems to be working properly now.
Thanks for the input though. Like I said I will mark this as resolved if my computer continues to be stable and I will report back if the problem persits.
p.s. I'm aware we'll be rebasing from Fedora 41 soon, possibly tomorrow. If the problem persists I'll try the upgrade too.I think this ujust needs to be updated, it does not expect to be used with a nvidia-open image. It's trying to rebase bazzite-gnome-open
I'm now officially out of ideas. After 3 hours of no slowdowns, my PC slowed down a lot again.
open up the terminal and run
btop see if something is maxing out your CPU in the backgroundIt's pretty much what I mentioned earlier on. Some processes like Firefox and sometimes gnome-shell surpass the 100% mark when the system is slowed down but at the same time the temperature drops by 10°C while it's slowed down. It's almost as if the CPU is throttled?
maybe worth running
journalctl -f and see if any error messages are spamming while you try and run firefox and gnome-shell
There is also this thread with random apps crashing with nvidia https://discord.com/channels/1072614816579063828/1290718171111620710 where the solution was to add an environment variable. So other things to try