[pulseaudio-discuss] Stability of PulseAudio on Ubuntu 9.04?

[Mark Greenwood]

On Sunday 28 Jun 2009 23:11:59 Timothy J Massey wrote:
> I had yet another PA crash, this time while trying to mute and unmute 
> sink-inputs:
> 
> Jun 28 17:06:38 mdsound pulseaudio[3058]: sink-input.c: Assertion 
> 'tchunk.memblock' failed at pulsecore/sink-input.c:556, function 
> pa_sink_input_peek(). Aborting.
> 
> 
> Basically, I cannot keep PA up and running under Ubuntu 9.04.  Moving a 
> sink-input around crashes PA.  Muting sink inputs crashes PA.  Basically, 
> anything you want to do from the command line has a very real chance of 
> killing PA.
> 
> I was running an unupdated Ubuntu 9.04 installation.  I have now done a 
> full update of all security and recommended updates, and I get the same 
> results.  It seems that I'm not the only person getting this type of 
> result (https://bugs.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+source/pulseaudio/+bug/332667), 
> and I don't know what to do about this.
> 
> I know that PA is very sensitive to problems in ALSA, and that maybe these 
> crashes are not PA's direct fault.  But I can't seem to find anything that 
> points to anything other than PA...
> 
> Are there any suggestions on things I could try?  I started with Fedora 
> 11, and it's CPU usage was *incredible*:  a single stream could not play 
> smoothly on a P4 1.6GHz machine.  Not much of a machine, but it couldn't 
> play a single MP3 stream?!?
> 
> Should I move to Windows?  :)
> 
> Any help, suggestions or comments would be appreciated.  Thank you!
> 
> Timothy J. Massey
> 
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I've been struggling too. Ubuntu's kernels don't help, they're not exactly optimised. However I've been having similar troubles with recent Mandriva installations too so I don't think we can point all the blame at Ubuntu.

6 months ago I was using Ubunutu 8.10 and Mandriva 2008.1 and Pulseaudio was rock solid, everything worked faultlessly. They were both using Pulseaudio 0.9.10. Since I've upgraded to the newer releases I'm having all sorts of troubles.

I don't want to sit here on this list and just badmouth Pulseaudio, it's a complex thing and I'm the first to admit its workings are beyond my comprehension. When I was using 0.9.10 it was one of my Linux 'killer apps'. Maybe ALSA is broken these days and that's making Pulse look bad? I don't know.

Things that helped me were: Use speex-float-5 as the resampler. use tsched=0 (already enabled on Ubuntu). Make sure Pulseaudio is using realtime scheduling (under Ubuntu you need to use policykit for this, I use Kubuntu so I can't tell you how to do it in GNOME). These have got it fairly stable for me, though it's still nowhere near as good as it used to be and I've more or less given up on it. Network sinks and RTP still crash it or just don't work properly. Good luck.

Mark