Periodic pauses in cinnamon cause stutter in screen updates

• Cinnamon version: 4.0.10
• Distribution: LMDE 3 (Cindy)
• Graphics hardware: Nvidia Quadro K2100M w/ Nvidia driver
• 64 bit

Issue

Cinnamon (the process/window manager) stutters periodically while updating the screen, about every 2 seconds on my system. My intuition was that a repeating pause like this is probably related to garbage collection, and some brief performance profiling seems confirm that (see the attachment below).

Steps to reproduce

• Log into a cinnamon session
• apt-get install libmozjs-52-0-dbgsym libcjs-dbg linux-tools
• Open a terminal and run perf top -p $(pgrep -x cinnamon) -d1 -z to see approximately what cinnamon is doing in any given second
• Move a window around, autoscroll, run glxgears. Anything that produces a smooth animation over time

Expected behaviour

Smooth animation, with no pauses or stuttering.

Actual behaviour

A pause that occurs about once every 2 seconds on my system. The perf top update immediately after the pause seems to show evidence of a GC operation taking place, with lots of time spent in symbols like js::GCMarker::drainMarkStack, js::GCMarker::markAndScan<*>, and so on. To illustrate what I mean, I've attached a snapshot of some perf terminal output at cinnamon-perf-top-sample.txt, from a one second window that included one of these pauses.

More info

I see this problem with browsers, 3D applications like glxgears, terminals, and the window manager itself, so I can rule out problems with any specific application. The perf output seems to confirm this.

Start by reproducing the pause in a Cinnamon session using the listed animation steps and the provided perf top command. Review cinnamon-perf-top-sample.txt and compare profiling output around a pause, especially the reported GC symbols. Done means smooth animations without the roughly two-second stutter.