Horrendous latency in Chrome

[Chris West]

This driver update makes (official) Chrome very laggy for me. While lagging, it causes sound and mouse movement to glitch out; the whole machine feels hung up. Other applications feel laggier, but it might be imagination. The Chrome effect is real and serious.

There's some discussion of this in various apps for various people on the nVidia forum:
https://devtalk.nvidia.com/default/topic/1029484/linux/-various-all-distros-numerous-performance-amp-rendering-issues-on-390-25/1

Running Chrome with `--no-sandbox` significantly improves the state of the Chrome issue for me, as suggested in that thread. chromium-browser and Firefox do glitch slightly, but nowhere near as badly as official Chrome.

I haven't seen any other issues raised about this on the Ubuntu tracker, certainly none against the driver, which is where I first thought to look.

Steps to reproduce, for me:

 1. Install official google-chrome-stable from Google.
 2. Visit Google Maps: https://maps.google.com/
 3. Enable Satellite, or Birds Eye view.

Whole machine appears to stutter and lag.

I'm running a desktop desktop 1050Ti, a very popular card. i3wm (i.e. no compositing). btrfs /home.

ProblemType: Bug
DistroRelease: Ubuntu 18.04
Package: nvidia-driver-390 390.25-0ubuntu4
ProcVersionSignature: Ubuntu 4.15.0-10.11-generic 4.15.3
Uname: Linux 4.15.0-10-generic x86_64
NonfreeKernelModules: nvidia_modeset nvidia
ApportVersion: 2.20.8-0ubuntu10
Architecture: amd64
Date: Mon Mar 12 14:06:05 2018
SourcePackage: nvidia-graphics-drivers-390
UpgradeStatus: Upgraded to bionic on 2018-02-19 (20 days ago)

[André (andremoreira-cp)]

The same happens to me. In addition, when I lock the session and then I log back, the chrome crashes.

[Launchpad Janitor (janitor)]

Status changed to 'Confirmed' because the bug affects multiple users.

[Christian Skeide (cskeide)]

Same issue here, although the stutter only lasts for a few seconds and then everything seems to go back to normal.

Can also reproduce by starting a YouTube video. Stutters as the video begins and then stabilizes after a few seconds. Same happens when I switch to or from YouTube's full-screen mode.

So far the only workaround I've found is to disable hardware acceleration in chrome settings and let the CPU do the work.

[Christian Skeide (cskeide)]

Did some more testing and I cannot reproduce the issue using google-chrome-unstable (67.0.3386.1-1)

[Tim Richardson (tim-richardson)]

Chromium/Chrome has patched this from current 66 betas

[DimanNe (dimanne)]

Also see https://bugs.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+source/chromium-browser/+bug/1768199/