Bug 775261

I have this problem as well - it happened in the following situations: when I open up a option window in Thunderbird, when I open Cheese to use webcam.

Can you verify if you see any particular task consuming extreme CPU?
'top' might give some insight, especially as you seem able to reproduce this issue

Of course. I will make sure to check it out when it happens again.

(In reply to comment #2)
> Can you verify if you see any particular task consuming extreme CPU?
> 'top' might give some insight, especially as you seem able to reproduce this
> issue

Wow it happened right after I posted the comment above. 
This time it happened when I opened up FireFox (Thunderbird was open as well) .. I just feel like it has something to do with Mozilla apps.

Anywhy, I checked top, and actually it was gnome-shell which was having 100% CPU usage. Hope this is helpful in tracking this bug.

gnome-shell definitely has issues with Mozilla apps, or rather, whatever GUI component Mozilla apps using. 

I just found that when I have Thunderbird open, not only gnome-shell tends to hang, but also gnome activities overview becomes really slow. With Thunderbird closed, it is very snappy. As soon as I open Thunderbird, the animation became very slow and not even complete (only shows several parts of overview window, not all). 

Other things such as invoking alt-tab seems to be fine. Only activities overview has been affected so far.

I'm using nouveau driver with nvidia card, so I'm not sure if this is caused by the driver.

-Joon

Whenever I experience this issue, I find that gnome-shell itself is consuming the CPU.

It seems to be nouveau driver problem. I started using nvidia driver and this stopped happening. Also, I reverted back to nouveau driver after recent update, and it is noticeably improved - shell overview is now smooth with many apps (including thunderbird) open. Still sometimes gnome-shell freezes but it is much less frequent.

I have an Intel built-in graphics card and don't use neither Firefox nor Thunderbird, but also experience gnome-shell freezes. Usually it happens after pressing Super key to activate overview mode (unfortunately, I can't provide more specific information). Desktop becomes completely freezed until gnome-shell is killed. It's still the case in 12.3 RC1.

This bug is still alive and well in latest openSUSE Tumbleweed (GNOME 3.8.1) and 3.9.0-6-desktop kernel. I'd dont have anything specific to provide right now but I will bookmark this and would be glad to help debug the issue in anyway I can!

*** Bug 800683 has been marked as a duplicate of this bug. ***

I use Chrome for almost 100% of my web surfing. Thinking back, I had Chrome running when most of the crashes occurred...The majority of the crashes, actually. They occur EVEN MORE frequently if I have a youtube or netflix video playing but they aren't exclusive to videos being played. Could it have something to do with the way Chrome/Firefox/Flash interact with the GPU? It's just a thought, I really don't have actual coding knowledge. I have GNOME 3.8.1 installed on my main distro, openSUSE Tumbleweed, as well as Cinnarch: GNOME, & Ubuntu: GNOME Remix so its definitely not distro-specific. I will do my best to get some logs posted. I need to figure out why GDM & Xorg aren't producing any session logs or if something is preventing the logs from being saved. But. that's a whole different bug lol. Please, if there is anything specific I can do to help trace this let me know. Thanks!

My System Info:
 
Dell Inspirion N411Z - openSUSE, Cinnarch: GNOME, & Ubuntu: GNOME Remix
Intel Core i3-2350M CPU @ 2.30GHz
Intel Sandybridge Mobile HD Graphics
6GB SODIMM DDR3 1333 MHz Ram
SMBIOS version 2.6
DMI version 2.6

In GNOME 3.8 the session logs all moved to the systemd journal.

Try:

journalctl _UID=1000

where 1000 is your UID.  (The id command will show you your UID if you don't know it. I think YaST does too.)

If that doesn't work, leave out the filter and you'll still get the logs (but a lot more, too).

This happens to me as well (in openSUSE 12.3) but it usually happens when I try to unlock the screen. Sometimes, after I input the password and hit the Return, it just displays a blank screen. I have to switch to other VT to manually restart gnome-shell.

As 12.3 is out of support and gnome is quite newer now please try the latest supported release and open a new report if you can still reproduce the problem.