pulseaudio causes long login delay waiting for bluetooth

[clepsdyrae]

Kubuntu 16.04 --

I was experiencing a long delay when logging in, on the order of 20+ seconds. After entering the password on the splash screen, it would stay there before showing the desktop.

journalctl revealed a timeout form pulseaudio waiting for a bluetooth service (I don't not use bluetooth, and it is disabled, but I believe I saw this even when I enabled it?)

Jun 26 10:43:42 machinename org.kde.KScreen[1988]: kscreen: Primary output changed from KScreen::Output(Id: 68 , Name: "HDMI1" ) ( "HDMI1" ) to KScreen::Output(Id: 68 , Name: "HDMI1" ) ( "HDMI1" )
Jun 26 10:44:02 machinename dbus[982]: [system] Failed to activate service 'org.bluez': timed out
Jun 26 10:44:02 machinename pulseaudio[2121]: [pulseaudio] bluez5-util.c: GetManagedObjects() failed: org.freedesktop.DBus.Error.NoReply: Did not receive a reply. Possible causes include: the remote application did not send a reply, the message bus security policy blocked the reply, the reply timeout expired, or the network connection was broken.

I can fix the problem by editing /etc/pulse/default.pa and commenting out both bluetooth lines ("load-module module-bluetooth-policy" and "load-module module-bluetooth-discover" -- not sure if both are actually necessary.)

I have seen other bugs relating to blocking calls to bluetooth causing problems. Perhaps there are a few left.

[Launchpad Janitor (janitor)]

Status changed to 'Confirmed' because the bug affects multiple users.

[Jordan (jordanu)]

I have encountered this same bug delaying login with Ubuntu Gnome 16.04, 16.10, and 17.04. I am happy to apport-collect if that would be helpful.

I can also confirm that commenting out "load-module module-bluetooth-policy" and "load-module module-bluetooth-discover" successfully worked around the problem for me and also stopped the apport crash report dialogs that I was getting at every login about pulseadio crashing.

[Jordan (jordanu)]

I guess I was mistaken about commenting out "load-module module-bluetooth-policy" and "load-module module-bluetooth-discover", that did not solve the problem for me.

A successful workaround though was to "sudo rm /xdg/autostart/pulseaudio.desktop" which stops gnome-session from trying to start start-pulseaudio-x11 (and block until it signals completion of startup, which takes about 30 seconds).

Even without /xdg/autostart/pulseaudio.desktop pulse is being spawned by something, as can be seen from "pgrep pulse", and I can play sounds fine.

I am *not* recommending this as a general solution for everyone as I do not know what ramifications there might be to not having /xdg/autostart/pulseaudio.desktop that I just might not have noticed. I assume that it is there for a reason.