[pulseaudio-tickets] [PulseAudio] #828: Flash causes PA to get into broken state; affects other apps

[PulseAudio]

#828: Flash causes PA to get into broken state; affects other apps
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 Reporter:  lukehutch  |       Owner:  lennart
     Type:  defect     |      Status:  new    
Milestone:             |   Component:  daemon 
 Keywords:             |  
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 Ever since PulseAudio has been the default in Fedora, I have experienced
 the following bug:

 If I leave browser tabs open for long periods of time that contain Flash
 animations, eventually PulseAudio stops working.  Non-browser apps are
 also unable to play sound.  the PA daemon still appears to be running.
 However to get the sound back you have to do pulseaudio -k and then
 restart pulseaudio, *and* you have to kill the browser.  Just killing
 pulseaudio and restarting it while the browser is still running does not
 restore the ability of non-browser apps to access audio functions.  Also
 during the time that the audio functionality is broken, trying to play
 through Alsa is also broken.

 Occasionally (one time in 5-10 or so), killing PA, killing the browser,
 and restarting PA does not fix the audio system, and the only way to get
 back audio playback is restarting the machine.  I don't know what's wrong
 or how to reset the sound system short of killing PA and restarting it.

 Since the point at which PulseAudio actually breaks is very hard to pin
 down, I don't know how to reproduce, other than leaving the browser
 running for long periods of time with Flash-containing tabs open.  I don't
 have a reliable trigger, even though it happens *all* *the* *time*, every
 day or two, and has done with that frequency ever since PA became the
 Fedora default, making this a very annoying and persistent bug.

 I thought this bug would have been found and fixed by now, because it is
 so common for me, and affects sound playback on three different systems I
 use or have used, across all versions of Fedora that have employed PA.  I
 have seen a large number of similar bug reports online.  However I didn't
 try to report it until now because (1) I don't have good reproducibility
 criteria, and (2) I have read numerous comments from Lennart in various
 places since PA was first created about how if things were broken, it is
 the apps that needed fixing, not PulseAudio.  Trusting this, and reading
 about the awful hackery that is Flash's audio support, I have waited and
 watched across different versions of Flash as they went to
 libflash_support and switched audio mechanisms a couple of different times
 -- hoping that the bug would be fixed.  But a few years later it still
 persists.  But now that I think about it, even if Flash is broken, should
 it be able to pull down audio for the entire machine?

 This bug report is not meant to be a troll or flame, I just really want my
 audio to not break -- and even if it breaks for Flash, I don't want Flash
 to be able to pull down my entire audio stack for all apps.

 I am 100% willing to help debug this, if you can please point me in the
 right direction.  What do I need to do to gather the appropriate debug
 info?

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Ticket URL: <http://pulseaudio.org/ticket/828>
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