I'm running Ubuntu 14.10, and for the past couple of days, I'm facing graphics stuttering all over Unity, which mainly affects text and various parts of Unity (refer to screenshot).
And this particularly happens when I'm using several apps simultaneously like, Chrome (latest), multiple tabs open in Terminal (running node-http-server). And only way I can fix it is by rebooting or by logging out (i.e. resetting Unity session).
Note that it is 5 year old laptop with 3 GB of RAM, 2.0 Ghz dual-core Intel processor, 512 MB of swap memory (using swapfile mounted as Swap memory in /), with only Intel on-board graphics.
What could be the possible cause? as I'm suspecting it is possibly due to low swap memory but this never occurred to me on 14.04.
Best Answer
This kind of error is usually caused by memory issues.
My 8 year old laptop also has similar issues when I have a lot of tabs open on chrome(around 15 tabs) and when the system uses a lot of RAM. I use
indicator-multiloadto see how much RAM is used. My laptop only has 2.5 GB of RAM and also has an integrated graphics card.My guess would be that the system is unable to display the contents properly due to lack of enough memory.