Hi everyone!
My daily driver is a Surface Go 1 running Fedora with 8GB of ram and 128GB of storage. It is always hooked up to a Philips 273B screen via USB-C.
Most of the time, it is really fast and a perfect tiny Linux and Gnome machine easily hookable to a big screen for when you're not travelling.
However, sometimes, after installing updates but maybe not always, it is slow as hell. Sometimes, detaching the Surface from the big screen and hooking it again, solves the issue, but not always. It is a behavior I already had when I was using Ubuntu and I've had on Fedora since version 36.
Here are some useful printscreens from HTOP and the ressource management system:
#high cpu usage
#low cpu usage
I thought that maybe installing the Surface kernel would stop the issue, but it didn't..
Sometimes it's annoying enough to make me just want to use my wife's MacBook Pro 2012 running Fedora as a daily driver but the form factor is less practical.
Thanks in advance for any help!
Edit: it happens on startup, even after days of inactivity
Edit2: Thanks everyone for your help! I’ll see if it’s worry investigating more as the problem is more complex to solve than I thought
Edit 3: Apparently the problem was solved by switching to Silverblue after a failed update. I’ve been daily driving it for a month and the issue hasn’t returned
Heat? Could be overheating and throttling?
I guess I should have said it before, but it happens when starting the computer, sometimes a week after an update, so I don't think it's heat related. Especially because it sometimes solves itself after unplugging/plugging the external monitor through USB-C.
Ah, I thought the timeline between the events and the slowdown were a lot closer, and that unplugging the monitor just gave it enough time to cool down.
The monitor part is definitely odd, is it a particularly high res/Hz monitor?
Otherwise I'm also leaning towards excessive swapping being the culprit, but that doesn't explain the monitor part.