Pidgin freezes sporadically in Intrepid

[K. Lange]

Binary package hint: pidgin

After a recent update of the Pidgin 2.5.1 package in Intrepid, I'm finding my client will sporadically freezes for a few seconds, and then come back. When left running, it will sometimes crash (ie, overnight).

Intrepid
pidgin 1:2.5.1-0ubuntu1
I'd normally expect it to not freeze randomly.
But it did anyway.

[Mathieu Marquer (slasher-fun)]

Could you try this : launch Pidgin from a terminal, then go into Tools -> Preferences -> Sound, and click on "preview" at the bottom of the window. Do you have any message like

(pidgin:9106): GStreamer-CRITICAL **:
Trying to dispose element play, but it is not in the NULL state.
You need to explicitly set elements to the NULL state before
dropping the final reference, to allow them to clean up.

(pidgin:9106): GStreamer-CRITICAL **: gst_object_unref: assertion `((GObject *) object)->ref_count > 0' failed

(pidgin:9106): GStreamer-CRITICAL **: gst_element_set_state: assertion `GST_IS_ELEMENT (element)' failed

in the terminal?

If so, it is happening with me as well, and could be a duplicate of bug #162701

[Jeffrey Flaker (jflaker)]

Frequent freezing (darkened window) then will come back. Freezing is under different circumstances.

Opening chat windows
Adding buddy

just some of the few freezes I had.

[Kevin McGehee (kevin-mcgehee)]

The same thing happens to me, though I haven't had it fully crash, just freezing and taking 5-10 seconds to respond to a buddy list open, etc. No problems with sound.

[Román Contreras (roman-astaroth)]

Actually I don't know if I have the exact same trouble, since in my case, pidgin totally freezes.
I have tried what Marquer suggested, but I didn't have the expected output.

Anyway, I ran pidgin in debug mode for some time expecting to find the specific event that triggered the froze; after some time (and a lot of output) I found the following error :

(22:52:27) gstreamer: Failed to connect stream: Invalid argument

[Matti Pöllä (mpo)]

Confirmed freezing when sending messages.

As this is probably related to gstreamer a quick workaround is to disable all sounds (Tools > Mute sounds).

[Jeffrey Flaker (jflaker)]

Tracked the freezing down to MusicTracker plugin. Once this package was REMOVED, Pidgin no longer freezes.

[Laurie Clark-Michalek (laurielegit)]

This happens when no music is playing and the musictracker plugin trys to find the song playing. I have no idea how to fix this, but I can confirm thats what is happening to me. This bug isn't ubuntu specific aswell, I get it on archlinux aswell

[Pasan (pasang)]

Also occurs in Windows XP. Extremely annoying if you're typing in a large amount of text but the message becoming gibberish due to buffer overruns between the hiccups..

[Jeffrey Flaker (jflaker)]

This has been out there a while. I haven't tried this any further due to causing issues on my system.

My suggestion is to test MusicTracker plugin again in a controlled environment to see if this is still an issue. If this is still an issue, remove MusicTracker from the repositories until resolved.

[Mörgæs (moergaes)]

Closing due to age.
If a similar bug appears in 13.10 please open a new report.