[pulseaudio-discuss] "Unable to create stream: Connection terminated" happening relatively frequently in ubuntu 11.10

[Arun Raghavan]

On Mon, 2011-10-17 at 21:25 -0700, Dan Kegel wrote:
> I'm running a buildbot that runs all the wine tests several times an hour.
> All was well until I upgraded from ubuntu 10.04 to 11.10... then
> I started to see occasional errors like
>  ALSA lib pcm_pulse.c:746:(pulse_prepare) PulseAudio: Unable to create
> stream: Connection terminated
> or
>  ALSA lib pulse.c:229:(pulse_connect) PulseAudio: Unable to connect:
> Connection terminated
> 
> This blows my buildbot out of the water; nobody likes to be told that their
> patch to add a comment to notepad.c has broken wine's audio support.
> 
> I've filed bugs for this at winehq.org and ubuntu,
> http://bugs.winehq.org/show_bug.cgi?id=28653
> https://bugs.launchpad.net/bugs/874770
> but nobody has come up with any suggestions yet.
> 
> I downloaded the pulseaudio sources and built src/test/connect-stress.c,
> and am running it in a loop, but since it outputs "Connection terminated"
> in normal operation, it's kind of hard to tell whether it's detecting
> the problem or not :-)
> 
> This is the main source of spurious failures in my buildbot.
> Any ideas what could be causing the increased error rate, or
> how I might go about debugging it?
> 
> FWIW, this is on an i7.

A couple of things to look at:

1. Is there anything suspicious in your PA server logs? You can get
verbose output by killing pulseaudio and running it manually with -vvvv

2. Also useful is running the test with PULSE_LOG=4 to get debug output
on the client side.

Cheers,
Arun