Hyprland FPS degrades over time

[DamianBossPL]

Simply, Hyprland loses FPS after a while of use. However, in my case, it only happens when I'm running Dolphin emulator and playing. Over time, Hyprland's FPS would creep down from the stable 144fps (I have 144Hz monitor) to an unstable ~60. From my testing, it would also get worse when idle. It persists, and the only way I could resolve this was to restart Hyprland.

This behaviour tells me there could be a memory leak somewhere, but I'm not entirely sure.

System Details:

• OS: Arch Linux 6.15.7-arch1-1
• CPU: i7-1165G7
• GPU: Intel Iris Xe Graphics

[pdf]

What information is required to help investigate this? This is very consistent for me, and makes gaming all but impossible unless you're happy to play for 10mins at a time. Running under gamescope at least seems to at least isolate the problem so that rather than having to restart hyprland I can just restart gamescope.

The problem manifests here as going from very stable frames:

To consistent regular sawtooth latency spikes after whatever causes this kicks in:

I tested under Weston and could not reproduce.

[vaxerski]

Are you on git or release?

[pdf]

Release here.

[UjinT34]

Does this happen in other compositors? If the problem can be isolated then it's probably some dolphin issue with wayland in general

[pdf]

This is games in general here - above was taken from Megabonk, which is a native wayland/vulkan client. Couldn't repro under Weston.

In case it's relevant, this is a PRIME system (nvidia rendering to intel).

[bitterhalt]

Been playing tons on games and can't reproduce this.

[bitterhalt]

have you tried playing dolphin emulator?

Sorry I missed that, I haven't tried Dolphin.

[fxzzi]

everything working great for me in dolphin, no slowdowns at all

[pdf]

If it was happening for everyone there'd be a flood of reports. Certainly happens consistently for me though.

[gulafaran]

If it was happening for everyone there'd be a flood of reports. Certainly happens consistently for me though.

you could try -git if you want to. is a frame callback issue and damage issue going on in release that should be fixed with 5ba2d22

[pdf]

you could try -git if you want to. is a frame callback issue and damage issue going on in release that should be fixed with 5ba2d22

I tried -git and experienced the same behaviour.

[frebib]

I've been experiencing this to the point where some days I basically cannot play games at all. It seemed to start after 0.51.0 or so. For a while I was able to revert to 0.50.1 (on arch) and it seemed to resolve the issues. I have a pair of 240hz monitors and I've experienced this in many games from Minecraft (which is relatively easy to run) to other very demanding games. Recently I've been playing Grounded and immediately after reboot the game runs at a smooth ~100-150fps and over the period of 20 minutes or so it degrades to a literal slideshow around 20hz according to https://frameratetest.com/refresh-rate-tester/

I also see similar behaviour on the desktop by simply loading up the CPU. I can observe the desktop FPS drop from a smooth 240 down to around 20 by simply comping Hyprland. It recovers immediately when the compile stops.

I can repro with Hyprland 0.51.x and also git head from today on Arch using a Radeon 7900XT

[frebib]

Yeah, my plan is to attempt a bisect this afternoon. It's been a busy week. I'm hoping that I can get away without having to rebuild older versions of aquamarine and other deps for the 0.50.x builds otherwise this will get very messy/complex very fast. As a note for myself, I found this handy documentation on how to bisect hyprland: https://wiki.hypr.land/Crashes-and-Bugs/#bisecting-an-issue

On a related note, I did have a go trying to load my system up the other day to try and find a better reproducer than "open a game and play for 30 minutes" and noticed that loading to the CPU to 100% didn't really tank performance at all, however using stress -m (see https://linux.die.net/man/1/stress) to perform a shitload of malloc/free operations, hyprland fps dropped to a crawl. I don't know if that's notable, but I wouldn't expect that kind of behaviour 🤔

[frebib]

Bisecting is not going great. I'm on my second attempt and I'm struggling to find a silver bullet. The biggest problem seems to be that this issue is pretty hard to reproduce, except apparently when I just want to play games 💀

I don't know if this is notable, but performance generally seems a lot more consistent with only one display active. I'm unable to reproduce any slowness during bisecting with only one display. Typically I have both enabled.

[Aqa-Ib]

Do you have each display connected to different GPUs?
Laptop?

[frebib]

No, both displays are connected to the same 7900XT. This is a desktop

[frebib]

Update here, I'm taking a more practical approach to this bisect. I played Grounded several hours with both displays enabled and zero problems (at 06fcdbd). I'm gonna keep bisecting as I play over the next week or two as time allows and report back here if/when I find anything.

Interestingly (but entirely off-topic) it does seem that somewhere between ~0.49.0 and ~0.51.x, there were some performance improvements made in Hyprland. Whilst the game ran smoothly, the fps was consistently lower than what I'm used to. Not by much, but a few % for sure. It seemed to love 120fps which is exactly half vsync for me. Curious