[pulseaudio-discuss] pulseaudio bug?

[Tanu Kaskinen]

On Mon, 2014-03-17 at 04:06 +0400, Serge wrote:
> Hello.
> 
> Debian Wheezy, pulseaudio 4 from backports.
> Pulseaudio crashes randomly while playing audio or video.
> Example output of mpv:
> http://metafight.ru/files/e2-mpv-output.txt
> 
> If pulseaudio set to respawn, X crashes too, i need to restart it.
> If respawn disabled i can start pulseaudio server again for audio
> output.
> pulseverbose.log:
> http://metafight.ru/files/pulseverbose.log.txt

The log stops abruptly. I guess it stops at the point where pulseaudio
crashes? Can you run pulseaudio in a terminal so that you see what the
shell says when pulseaudio dies? Does it say "segmentation fault" or
"killed"?

If the shell says "killed", then pulseaudio probably consumes too much
cpu time in realtime mode (there seem to be quite a lot of rewinding
happening due to stream underruns and corking and uncorking, which might
explain the excessive cpu use). This may be considered a pulseaudio bug,
but I don't expect that anyone will have time to redesign the rewinding
logic so that it would be more robust against clients that constantly
have underruns and constantly cork and uncork themselves.

If the shell says "segmentation fault", then we'd need a backtrace from
gdb.

> Is it PA bug or can i change some settings to fix it?

If it's a cpu use issue, you can try working around it by setting
"realtime-scheduling = no" in daemon.conf.

-- 
Tanu