what computer are you using? I have a 4 core ryzen3 and clearing 50 notifications takes about 150ms. There's a max of 20 notifications per app as well.

@fredcw This is on my laptop - CPU is 11th Gen Intel(R) Core(TM) i7-11370H @ 3.30GHz.

Out of curiosity, I ran the same test (generating 50 notifications and clearing all) on my desktop, and did not have the same performance issue. That's running a 13th Gen Intel(R) Core(TM) i5-13600KF.

It might be worth investigating this further. Are there any other performance issues on your laptop?

Not really on the CPU side. Memory has been the bottleneck more than anything.

This is what my CPU usage looks like under normal usage:

I did manage to capture the CPU graph when I first hit this issue:

I was preparing a PR to fix this exact issue, good to know there was already one.

I can attest that the way I use Cinnamon, having a lot of apps that triggers notifications (mainly chat programs but also some custom notifications I have to keep track of things to do) I tend to read them but not dismiss them.

This make it so I regularly find myself with 100+ notifications and on my hardware (AMD Ryzen 7, 32GB RAM) clearing them takes some seconds (just tested: 5s more or less).

Not a big problem per se, but the whole UI freezes and it bothers me a bit, since it's a relatively simple fix (IMHO).

My fix would have been just this:

    _clear_all() {
        let toDestroy = this.notifications.slice();
        this.notifications = [];
        this._notificationbin.remove_all_children();
        for (let notification of toDestroy) {
            notification.destroy(NotificationDestroyedReason.DISMISSED);
        }
        this.update_list();
    }

But I'm no Cinnamon expert. With this change the clearing is immediate.

@enodari Yes, your method is better as it's not as complicated.

@jsharpe1 Do you want to update this PR to @enodari 's method or should I create a new one?

I just tested again with 40 notifications and it took about 2 seconds and about 38ms with this speedup. I'm not sure why it takes longer sometimes and not other times but in any case, this is still a 10x - 100x speedup so well worth it I think.

@enodari Love it, much cleaner, thanks for the suggestion

@fredcw I'll update the PR in a minute