Pulseaudio stalls and prevents other applications from starting

[rihasant]

Binary package hint: pulseaudio

Pulseaudio stalls and prevents other applications from starting. If I kill pulseaudio other applications will start just fine.

ProblemType: Bug
Architecture: i386
Date: Thu May 15 22:28:10 2008
DistroRelease: Ubuntu 8.04
ExecutablePath: /usr/bin/pulseaudio
NonfreeKernelModules: nvidia
Package: pulseaudio 0.9.10-1ubuntu1
PackageArchitecture: i386
ProcEnviron:
 PATH=/usr/local/sbin:/usr/local/bin:/usr/sbin:/usr/bin:/sbin:/bin:/usr/games
 LANG=en_GB.UTF-8
 SHELL=/bin/bash
SourcePackage: pulseaudio
Uname: Linux 2.6.24-17-generic i686

[Daniel T Chen (crimsun)]

By "stalls" do you mean that it dies?

[Daniel T Chen (crimsun)]

(to clarify, I mean its interaction with a native ALSA app, e.g., non-Free Flash)

[rihasant (riku.hs)]

By "stalls" I mean that it doesn't respond anymore. Actually I'm quite sure about the responding thing because I can't start any applications to confirm it. It doesn't die, because I have to kill it to get my system working.

Pulseaudio doesn't block all applications from starting. It seems that only applications that need some kind of audio are affected. Some applications (e.g. gnome-terminal) will start just fine, but the window of the application will remain "empty" until pulseaudio is killed.

I have no idea how to debug this bug. There seems to be no extra information in any log files. This bug is also hard to redo because I can't pinpoint the cause. Usually it occurs when I close mythfrontend and start rhythmbox, but not every time.

[rihasant (riku.hs)]

I have one confirmation on this bug. My friend have experienced this bug several times since his upgrade to hardy. For him it usually happens when he tries to start firefox. This bug is quite critical for him, because he's a non-technical person and this bug prevents graphical system shutdown, so he has been forced to do cold boots on his machine.

I'm going to change status to confirmed. Hopefully now this bug gains the attention it certainly deserves.

@Chen: I'm not quite sure how to check interaction with native ALSA apps. All I can say is that there is no sound coming from already running applications.

[Davi Garcia (davivcgarcia-deactivatedaccount)]

I confirm this bug and I have experienced this bug several times too. I cannot determine why this happens. I'm using Ubuntu Hardy fully updated, on my Lenovo Thinkpad R61i, with the x86 architecture.

When this happens on my notebook, I decided this problem killing the pulseaudio with this command:

$sudo killall -9 pulseaudio

Keep attention if there is another application that uses it too. Sometime ago, I needed to kill pulseaudio and I forgot that the pidgin was running too... 100% of CPU use and a huge memory leak...

Thanks.

[Davi Garcia (davivcgarcia-deactivatedaccount)]

Hi again,

You can solve this problem with this command too:

$sudo /etc/init.d/pulseaudio restart

PS: This solution is more "polite"... =P

Bye.

[robepisc (robepisc)]

I have the same problem: every once in a while, PA hangs.
However the real problem is that it locks the whole Gnome session:
 - newly started applications hang (but don't die) before they can even display their window;
 - I can't logout;
 - already running applications keep on working.
If switch to a VT and killall -KILL pulseaudio, all the applications I lauched (or tried to lauch) unlock and finish loading.
It is as if my mouse clicks were recorded and get replayed all at once pulseaudio dies.

There is more than one bug behind this: some in PA, others in libgnome and libesd.
In particular libgnome and libesd cause applications to freeze while loading if PA does not respond.

Jeffrey Stedfast talked about these issues on Planet Gnome this July.
See here http://jeffreystedfast.blogspot.com/search/label/pulseaudio for more infos.

In particular:
1) GNOME-BUG #542391: libesd should not block if the daemon dies/hangs/whatever
2) GNOME-BUG #542296: gnome_sound needs to handle pa hangs more gracefully
3) PA ticket #321 [http://www.pulseaudio.org/ticket/321]: pulseaudio continually locks up my GNOME desktop

Note that gnome bug #542391 is fixed in esound-0.2.39 (but I have 0.2.38-0ubuntu9 in Hardy), gnome bug #54229 (on libgnome) should be fixed too (but I can't understand if this fix is in Hardy) and ticket #321 seems not to affect Intrepid users (as stated by the last comment by ali1234 there).

[Daniel T Chen (crimsun)]

The per-user daemon is now invoked dynamically instead of statically at login.