[pulseaudio-discuss] GStreamer + "Frozen" streams + memory eating

[Colin Guthrie]

CJ van den Berg wrote:
> Hi,
> 
> On Tue, Mar 04, 2008 at 09:45:10AM +0000, Colin Guthrie wrote:
>> I've been having some trouble lately with (I think) the GStreamer sink.
>>
>> Let me try to explain:
>>
>> When suspending on my laptop, gnome-power-manager often plays a "bing"
>> noise to let me know I've closed my lid (I know I've closed my lid by
>> virtue of the fact I've just closed the lid.... ;)). When the machine
>> comes back from resume, there is sometimes (maybe one in three?) a
>> problem with playing sound. I think this is an ALSA issue (rmmodding the
>> snd_hda_intel and modprobing it again works) but that is another matter.
>>
>> When this happens there is often a "frozen" stream listed in
>> pavucontrol. It just sits there never ending. In order to reload the
>> alsa driver, I have to kill pa as it is "hogging" the sound card due to
>> this frozen stream. When I kill pa (or indeed just the stream),
>> gnome-power-manager "goes nuts". It eats memory and loads the system
>> quite heavily.
>>
>> I have to kill gnome-power-manager.
>>
>>
>> I initially put this down to g-p-m doing something silly, but looking at
>> the sound code there is very little in the way of loops and it just
>> off-loads to gstreamer.
>>
>> Last night, I noticed that a similar thing had happened but this time I
>> had lots of pidgin streams "saved up". I started killing them and the
>> same thing happened, pidgin started going nuts and eating ram.
>>
>> So the common factor is gstreamer. Does anyone have any info on this?
> 
> I don't have any more info myself, but to help bug triaging I thought I
> would mention that this is probably the same issue as pulseaudio bug
> #188, and maybe related to #251.
> 
> And, if anyone is interested, this is Debian bug #459915.

Ahh #188 is a bug from Fred, a fellow Mandriva packager... I'll see if
we can narrow down the test cases a bit.

The #251 one also looks likely. I wonder if this applies to just killing
streams or all of pa...  <test> Yes it does.

Col