pulseaudio continually locks up my GNOME desktop

[jstedfast]

I don't know what causes it, but I'll be talking to friends/coworkers over pidgin (which presumably must use the esd interface??) and randomly when I receive an IM, I get no sound and pidgin locks up.

at this point, one of 2 things happens:

1. restarting pidgin works, but I no longer get any sound events

or

2. I can't launch any gnome programs anymore (nor firefox). trying to log out also hangs. init 3; init 5 doesn't even work - I get a hang as gdm auto-logs me in (I have my system configured for auto-login)

[ipse]

I think I have the same problem. I usually notice PA being hanged when I'm not getting any sounds out of my VirtualBox? VM (which use PA as an audio source/sink on host). This happens on regular basis, so I can provide any information needed to debug this.

For the start, I'm using Ubuntu 8.04 Hardy Heron on x86_64 with pulseaudio 0.9.10-1ubuntu1 package installed.

I attached output of 'thread apply all bt' command in gdb when PA is hanged. Hope it will give initial information for debug. Also note, in this state PA does not respond to SIGTERM and can be killed only with SIGKILL.

[ipse]

'thread apply all bt' output for hanged PA

[ipse]

One more gdb output after pulseaudio hangs.

[ipse]

This hang happens again and again, two-three times per day! It is very annoying to find a lot of events in my VM which I didn't heard about, because PA've hanged (again!). Please, do something with this. I would be glad assist debugging this.

I found that PA is very unstable, have horrible audio quality (clicks and audio distortion probably because of resampling) and introduce huge latency. I can't believe it was set as default for many Linux distributions. Probably this is due to misconfiguration, but *must* work out of box, isn't it?

[Adys]

https://bugs.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+source/pidgin/+bug/200392

Is this what you are experiencing?

[ipse]

For me - no. Memory usage does not increase.

[ali1234]

This sounds similar to a problem I was experiencing.

My Gnome desktop was set to use pulse as output. If I were to launch a program which used ALSA directly it would take control of the sound card and block pulse from making any sound. If any Gnome application tried to make a sound during this time, it would not be heard.

The lock happened when I quit the ALSA-using program. At this point, whatever sound was played by pulse during the period in which the sound card was in use would play continuously in a loop of about 50 msec. Gnome panel would stop responding and new programs could not be launched. The only way out was to switch to a console and reboot the computer.

The work around for me was to make sure no programs were using ALSA directly. For me this only happened in Ubuntu 8.04 and seems to have been fixed in Ubuntu 8.10 (beta) as now ALSA apps get "magically" redirected to pulse somehow.

[caetano]

The problem is because pulseaudio gets exclusive access to soundcard, in this way programs that uses others api will hang waiting to write access on the soundcard.

[coling]

Replying to caetano:

The problem is because pulseaudio gets exclusive access to soundcard, in this way programs that uses others api will hang waiting to write access on the soundcard.

This really doesn't make any sense as:

1. Pulse let's go of the soundcard when it's not needed (suspend-on-idle)
2. If you enable pulse then you should be enabling all the ways in which pulse can integrate with other sound systems such as:
   • Enable alsa-pulse plugin
   • Use padsp when launching oss applications
   • Configuring applications to use native pulse support when available

If you enable these things and set things up correctly, no other api will be actually talking to the h/w directly but will actually be going through pulse.

[lennart]

At least ipse's bug has been fixed a while back. Will close this now. If problem persists please open new seperate bugs and include exact information where things hang (gdb bt's and pulseaudio -vvvv outputs would be great)