The performance of the icon grid was being hindered by a large number
of primitives (a few hundred) being copied from the CPU to the GPU on
each frame. This was first noticed in mutter#971 but we failed to
investigate all the issues at the time.
You can also see the high number using `COGL_DEBUG=batching` or
`COGL_DEBUG=disable-texturing`. So now it's obvious that high number is
every letter of every label being uploaded as a separate quad. Let's not
do that and instead treat the whole label as a single quad/texture.
Measured performance on an i7-7700 at UHD 3840x2160:
Journal entries per frame on the icon grid:
* Before: 288 (18 KB copied from CPU to GPU)
* After: 73 ( 4 KB copied from CPU to GPU)
Spring animation:
* Before: 20-30 FPS, avg 22/peak 45 milliseconds per frame
* After: 30-40 FPS, avg 14/peak 28 milliseconds per frame
Scrolling the icon grid:
* Before: 15 FPS, 50 milliseconds per frame
* After: 30 FPS, 28 milliseconds per frame
https://gitlab.gnome.org/GNOME/gnome-shell/-/merge_requests/1329
ae338af1e8