Gnome-shell acting very poorly under stress

[Martin Constantino–Bodin]

How to reproduce:
* in Gnome-shell, starts VLC. Drag and drop a .str file into VLC (without providing it any video file).
* A bug in VLC will make it use 100% CPU for quite a long time.
* Meanwhile, in a terminal, type “top”.
* Gnome-shell will appear as one of the programs taking a lot of resources.
* Shortly after, the whole Gnome-shell will freeze and no longer respond. This is a stressful situation for the user: not only is the computer burning hot, but the window manager is no longer responding.
* Ctrl+Alt+F3 to open a TTY, kill -9 <pid of gnome-shell>
* Gnome-shell restarts, enabling you to interact with the windows, but shortly afterwards, everything will freeze again.

In this situation, the system is under huge stress because of VLC. However, this should not be an excuse to let the whole system stop responding altogether. There is clearly an issue in VLC here, but this kind of gnome-shell freeze appears with a variety of system-stresses on my computer, not just VLC. It may be that VLC is causing a lot of system calls that are caught by Gnome-shell? I am not sure what exactly is happening.

I am not sure even whether this is really an issue with Gnome-shell: it may be an issue with its parent process, or whatever.

System stress is not an ideal situation, and I fully understand that it can be difficult to deal with. I just feel that Gnome-shell could handle it slightly better.

I would understand that this bug report might be too subjective and be marked as invalid. Anyway, I just wanted to share my frustration. If I can help in any way, please tell me how ☺

ProblemType: Bug
DistroRelease: Ubuntu 18.04
Package: gnome-shell 3.28.4-0ubuntu18.04.3
ProcVersionSignature: Ubuntu 4.15.0-1081.91-oem 4.15.18
Uname: Linux 4.15.0-1081-oem x86_64
ApportVersion: 2.20.9-0ubuntu7.15
Architecture: amd64
CurrentDesktop: ubuntu:GNOME
Date: Mon Jun 15 20:51:24 2020
DisplayManager: gdm3
DistributionChannelDescriptor:
 # This is the distribution channel descriptor for the OEM CDs
 # For more information see http://wiki.ubuntu.com/DistributionChannelDescriptor
 canonical-oem-somerville-bionic-amd64-20180608-47+berlinetta-cfl-r+X77
ExecutablePath: /usr/bin/gnome-shell
GsettingsChanges:
 b'org.gnome.shell' b'enable-hot-corners' b'true'
 b'org.gnome.shell' b'favorite-apps' redacted by apport
 b'org.gnome.desktop.interface' b'gtk-im-module' b"'gtk-im-context-simple'"
 b'org.gnome.desktop.interface' b'show-battery-percentage' b'true'
 b'org.gnome.desktop.interface' b'clock-show-date' b'true'
InstallationDate: Installed on 2019-08-28 (291 days ago)
InstallationMedia: Ubuntu 18.04 "Bionic" - Build amd64 LIVE Binary 20180608-09:38
ProcEnviron:
 PATH=(custom, user)
 XDG_RUNTIME_DIR=<set>
 LANG=en_GB.UTF-8
 SHELL=/bin/bash
SourcePackage: gnome-shell
UpgradeStatus: No upgrade log present (probably fresh install)

[Daniel van Vugt (vanvugt)]

Please run these commands:

  lspci -k > lspcik.txt
  gsettings list-recursively org.gnome.shell > settings.txt

and also after the problem has started happening run:

  journal -b0 > journal.txt

and attach all the resulting text files here.

[Launchpad Janitor (janitor)]

[Expired for gnome-shell (Ubuntu) because there has been no activity for 60 days.]