This has been an ongoing issue with X11 compositers like marco, unity and cinnamon etc... I find especially with an Nvidia GPU that as the system runs longer after a number of weeks or a number of months the GUI just gets slower and slower.  It's not something you'll instantly notice but just a hint of lag here or there that gets worse.

One hint you'll find is by watching nvidia-smi and checking the utilization you will start seeing random spikes of 80-100% even without maxing out GPU RAM and with litle or not actual activity that should cause that usage.  During this phase even swiching browser tabs might cause 80-100% spikes which is not normal.  The usual suspects may be to close your browsers but that still won't fix it.

Use this guide here to reload your GUI without losing any existing windows.

After resetting the compositer utilization and GUI responsiveness should feel that same as restarting Xorg or the whole computer.

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