pulseaudio[1641]: ratelimit.c: 22715 events suppressed

[clickwir]

Binary package hint: pulseaudio

Kubuntu 10.10 64bit. I was having some audio problems since upgrading to 10.10 from 10.04. I got sick of it and did a fresh install. Total wipe of the drive and reinstall from cd. First boot seemed ok, but quickly ran into problems. Originally when I had this problem, I was using a Creative X-Fi PCI SB0730 (XtremeGamer I believe). I was getting a lot of "pulseaudio[1641]: ratelimit.c: 22715 events suppressed" in /var/log/messages.

pulseaudio:
  Installed: 1:0.9.22~0.9.21+stable-queue-32-g8478-0ubuntu21.1
  Candidate: 1:0.9.22~0.9.21+stable-queue-32-g8478-0ubuntu21.1
  Version table:
 *** 1:0.9.22~0.9.21+stable-queue-32-g8478-0ubuntu21.1 0
        500 http://ubuntu.mirror.frontiernet.net/ubuntu/ maverick-updates/main amd64 Packages
        500 http://us.archive.ubuntu.com/ubuntu/ maverick-updates/main amd64 Packages
        100 /var/lib/dpkg/status
     1:0.9.22~0.9.21+stable-queue-32-g8478-0ubuntu21 0
        500 http://ubuntu.mirror.frontiernet.net/ubuntu/ maverick/main amd64 Packages
        500 http://us.archive.ubuntu.com/ubuntu/ maverick/main amd64 Packages

I saw some others were having trouble and needed the pulseaudio logs. I did get one while I was having the trouble, I'll try to post that.

Note: I've since removed the X-Fi and am using a Diamond Monster Sound ES1968 PCI card. On first boot, things seemed fine. KDE sounds were fine and I even watched a <2 mins YouTube vid with no trouble. I then opened VLC and was playing a song, about 75% through the song, sound was cutting out. Skipping and the whole system became very slow and almost unresponsive. Once I closed VLC (kill) everything came back... except sound. Now, even after rebooting, sound is sporadic. That's why I believe this is a pulseaudio problem and no something specific to the X-Fi.

lspci
00:00.0 Host bridge: Intel Corporation 82Q35 Express DRAM Controller (rev 02)
00:01.0 PCI bridge: Intel Corporation 82Q35 Express PCI Express Root Port (rev 02)
00:03.0 Communication controller: Intel Corporation 82Q35 Express MEI Controller (rev 02)
00:19.0 Ethernet controller: Intel Corporation 82566DM-2 Gigabit Network Connection (rev 02)
00:1a.0 USB Controller: Intel Corporation 82801I (ICH9 Family) USB UHCI Controller #4 (rev 02)
00:1a.1 USB Controller: Intel Corporation 82801I (ICH9 Family) USB UHCI Controller #5 (rev 02)
00:1a.2 USB Controller: Intel Corporation 82801I (ICH9 Family) USB UHCI Controller #6 (rev 02)
00:1a.7 USB Controller: Intel Corporation 82801I (ICH9 Family) USB2 EHCI Controller #2 (rev 02)
00:1c.0 PCI bridge: Intel Corporation 82801I (ICH9 Family) PCI Express Port 1 (rev 02)
00:1c.1 PCI bridge: Intel Corporation 82801I (ICH9 Family) PCI Express Port 2 (rev 02)
00:1c.2 PCI bridge: Intel Corporation 82801I (ICH9 Family) PCI Express Port 3 (rev 02)
00:1c.3 PCI bridge: Intel Corporation 82801I (ICH9 Family) PCI Express Port 4 (rev 02)
00:1c.4 PCI bridge: Intel Corporation 82801I (ICH9 Family) PCI Express Port 5 (rev 02)
00:1d.0 USB Controller: Intel Corporation 82801I (ICH9 Family) USB UHCI Controller #1 (rev 02)
00:1d.1 USB Controller: Intel Corporation 82801I (ICH9 Family) USB UHCI Controller #2 (rev 02)
00:1d.2 USB Controller: Intel Corporation 82801I (ICH9 Family) USB UHCI Controller #3 (rev 02)
00:1d.7 USB Controller: Intel Corporation 82801I (ICH9 Family) USB2 EHCI Controller #1 (rev 02)
00:1e.0 PCI bridge: Intel Corporation 82801 PCI Bridge (rev 92)
00:1f.0 ISA bridge: Intel Corporation 82801IO (ICH9DO) LPC Interface Controller (rev 02)
00:1f.2 SATA controller: Intel Corporation 82801IR/IO/IH (ICH9R/DO/DH) 6 port SATA AHCI Controller (rev 02)
00:1f.3 SMBus: Intel Corporation 82801I (ICH9 Family) SMBus Controller (rev 02)
01:00.0 VGA compatible controller: ATI Technologies Inc RV770 LE [Radeon HD 4800 Series]
01:00.1 Audio device: ATI Technologies Inc HD48x0 audio
04:00.0 IDE interface: Marvell Technology Group Ltd. 88SE6101 single-port PATA133 interface (rev b2)
07:00.0 Multimedia audio controller: ESS Technology ES1978 Maestro 2E (rev 10)

Pretty much anything that uses sound, makes the system almost unresponsive. If I tail -f /var/log/messages when this happens, I start seeing the pulseaudio ratelimit repeating. Several times I've seen 5 events suppressed. I've seen a couple thousand events suppressed, I've seen over 20,000 events suppressed in one line.

Oh, FYI... If I use VLC and tell it to use ALSA directly, there's a few skips here and there. But for the most part, it's acceptable. My uneducated guess is ALSA is skipping (rare, and not all the time) and pulseaudio doesn't know what to do and pukes.

If you are interested, I've had some troubleshooting done by a helpful forum member here: http://kubuntuforums.net/forums/index.php?topic=3114316

---
AlsaVersion: Advanced Linux Sound Architecture Driver Version 1.0.23.
Architecture: amd64
ArecordDevices:
 **** List of CAPTURE Hardware Devices ****
 card 0: E2E [ESS ES1978 (Maestro 2E)], device 0: ESS Maestro [ESS Maestro]
   Subdevices: 1/1
   Subdevice #0: subdevice #0
AudioDevicesInUse:
 USER PID ACCESS COMMAND
 /dev/snd/controlC0: clickwir 1768 F.... pulseaudio
Card0.Amixer.info:
 Card hw:0 'E2E'/'ESS ES1978 (Maestro 2E) at 0x1000, irq 21'
   Mixer name : 'SigmaTel STAC9721,23'
   Components : 'AC97a:83847609'
   Controls : 31
   Simple ctrls : 21
Card1.Amixer.info:
 Card hw:1 'HDMI'/'HDA ATI HDMI at 0xe0110000 irq 48'
   Mixer name : 'ATI R6xx HDMI'
   Components : 'HDA:1002aa01,00aa0100,00100100'
   Controls : 4
   Simple ctrls : 1
Card1.Amixer.values:
 Simple mixer control 'IEC958',0
   Capabilities: pswitch pswitch-joined penum
   Playback channels: Mono
   Mono: Playback [on]
DistroRelease: Ubuntu 10.10
InstallationMedia: Kubuntu 10.10 "Maverick Meerkat" - Release amd64 (20101007)
NonfreeKernelModules: fglrx
Package: alsa-driver (not installed)
ProcEnviron:
 LANGUAGE=
 PATH=(custom, no user)
 LANG=en_US.UTF-8
 SHELL=/bin/bash
ProcVersionSignature: Ubuntu 2.6.35-23.36-generic 2.6.35.7
Tags: maverick
Uname: Linux 2.6.35-23-generic x86_64
UserGroups:

dmi.bios.date: 11/24/2009
dmi.bios.vendor: Intel Corp.
dmi.bios.version: JOQ3510J.86A.1126.2009.1124.2311
dmi.board.asset.tag: Base Board Asset Tag
dmi.board.name: DQ35JO
dmi.board.vendor: Intel Corporation
dmi.board.version: AAD82085-804
dmi.chassis.type: 3
dmi.modalias: dmi:bvnIntelCorp.:bvrJOQ3510J.86A.1126.2009.1124.2311:bd11/24/2009:svn:pn:pvr:rvnIntelCorporation:rnDQ35JO:rvrAAD82085-804:cvn:ct3:cvr:

[Daniel T Chen (crimsun)]

This is an alsa-driver bug, not a pulseaudio one.

[clickwir (clickwir)]

Even with 2 different sound cards?

Playing directly to alsa is almost acceptable. Couldn't pulseaudio handle this better than making the whole system unstable?

[Daniel T Chen (crimsun)]

Pulse relies on the drivers providing accurate information, and that doesn't
seem to be the case here. You can manually hint to pulse that it should
fall back to the interrupt-based mode by passing tsched=0 to
module-udev-detect in /etc/pulse/default.pa, but I can't tell if that's
necessary here. Please see https://wiki.ubuntu.com/PulseAudio/Log. There
are also msec* tunables, but we should first establish that you need them.

[clickwir (clickwir)]

Just grabbed a log for pulseaudio. I can see why the system becomes unresponsive, this log was 13MB after just a min of trying to play audio. This was after putting in tsched=0.

[Daniel T Chen (crimsun)]

It looks like there's definitely a pulse component here; we should try tuning the msec* variables. Can you run apport-collect 669729 so that we have system information, too? (mainly dmesg)

[clickwir (clickwir)]

apport-collect seems to be having some trouble. But here's dmesg.

[clickwir (clickwir)]

apport information

[clickwir (clickwir)]

apport information

[clickwir (clickwir)]

apport information

[clickwir (clickwir)]

apport information

[clickwir (clickwir)]

apport information

[clickwir (clickwir)]

apport information

[clickwir (clickwir)]

apport information

[clickwir (clickwir)]

apport information

[clickwir (clickwir)]

apport information

[clickwir (clickwir)]

apport information

[clickwir (clickwir)]

Got the info. Is it any help?

[clickwir (clickwir)]

Found this thread that sounded similar to my problem: https://bugzilla.redhat.com/show_bug.cgi?id=638477

I tried what Linus said with the file, compiled it and did an LD_PRELOAD on VLC and Firefox. VLC got through most of one song and then stopped. Firefox, I wasn't able to watch any youtube videos. They just run in fast forward mode.

Just to keep things going and let ya'll know I was trying some things.

[clickwir (clickwir)]

Ok, I don't know what's going on. It looks like it might have helped some flash videos. After not actually using flash for a few hours, I had left Firefox open after doing the LD_PRELOAD, I tried a few youtube videos.

To my delight, they worked fine. So I put it to a further test and watched a 720p 15min video of Starcraft II. Worked fine. Feeling pumped, I tried another one. This one is also running at 720p and is from the same person who posted the other one. But this one, about half of it is normal speed and half is fast forward speed. I cannot watch this. I tried, but it's too choppy.

Heh. I got pulled away from my PC for about 10 mins. Came back and tried the same video that was choppy before. Played fine now. So, this is an improvement... but still a problem.