Comment 22 for bug 1773959

I've noticed the same issue with all extensions disabled. It seems very correlated with changes on the screen, to include moving the mouse. I've watched 'top' over an SSH connection to the system running gnome. If I have just a terminal window open any updates in that window cause gnome-shell CPU to jump to 7-9% CPU for a couple seconds (according to top which is updating every second on a remote shell). The updates and activities I've tested so far that seem to show this behavior are:

- moving the mouse around on the screen

- typing any amount of text in the open terminal window

- having top running in the open terminal window.

I'm guessing there is something in gnome-shell copying the screen to a buffer, and, after some period of inactivity it decreases its rate of copying... perhaps?