More GNOME Performance Optimizations Being Tackled Thanks To Canonical

While there has already been a lot of exciting GNOME performance improvements so far during the GNOME 3.32 cycle, even more could be on the way with there still being a number of open merge requests for enhancing the performance of the GNOME desktop.

Since Ubuntu switched from Unity back to GNOME, Canonical has been contributing more upstream patches to the GNOME stack. Ubuntu/Canonical developer Daniel Van Vugt in particular has been spearheading many of the desktop performance initiatives. He has landed a number of improvements in recent months but he has many open merge requests still to be addressed.

Among the open tickets still include:

- Clutter work for delivering events sooner -- more time before the next compositor frame, ideally one frame lower latency than before. This also allows for higher resolution input.

- A Mutter improvement to lower the CPU and GPU usage on mouse movements by avoiding the GPU when unnecessary.

- With Mutter's native renderer to accept new frames without ever blocking. This should help improve the GNOME Wayland multi-monitor performance and no longer starving monitors of new frames.

- While GNOME Wayland now works nicely at non-60Hz refresh rates, the mouse cursor is still stuck at 60Hz while a fix is pending to address that issue.

- Clutter Cogl work on reducing output latency and missed frames due to accidental triple buffering.

- Various other performance improvements, mostly related to Clutter and Mutter.

He shared some of his open GNOME performance-related work items (and more) via this Discourse ticket. Now let's hope that much of these GNOME performance improvements will be reviewed and merged in time for the 3.32.0 release in March, which in turn should end up in Ubuntu 19.04.