[Intrepid] pulseaudio periodically gets into a state where it does not play any sound and must be kill -9'ed and restarted

[Tristan Schmelcher]

Binary package hint: pulseaudio

Ever since upgrading to Intrepid from Hardy, the pulseaudio daemon periodically gets into a state where it does not play any sound. Some apps will actually freeze if I attempt to play sound in them (e.g., Rhythmbox) while others work normally but with no sound (e.g., Flash in Firefox using aoss and the pulse plugin via the .asoundrc). Trying to kill pulseaudio with -15 has no effect; instead you must use -9. After restarting it, newly opened applications will play sound just fine, until the problem occurs again. It happens about once per day for me, and so far it always seems to be when I'm not home, so perhaps the problem only occurs when sound is not in use? Or maybe there is some sort of gradual leak? I usually have Hulu, SMPlayer, and Rhythmbox open 24/7.

After it happened today I checked the syslog for things relating to pulseaudio and found only the following:

Nov 7 17:16:54 tinygod3 pulseaudio[30771]: protocol-native.c: Failed to push data into queue
Nov 7 17:16:55 tinygod3 last message repeated 15093 times

$ lsb_release -rd
Description: Ubuntu 8.10
Release: 8.10
$ apt-cache policy pulseaudio
pulseaudio:
  Installed: 0.9.10-2ubuntu9
  Candidate: 0.9.10-2ubuntu9
  Version table:
 *** 0.9.10-2ubuntu9 0
        500 http://archive.ubuntu.com intrepid/main Packages
        100 /var/lib/dpkg/status

[Tristan Schmelcher (tschmelcher)]

This is still happening. That message in the syslog shows up every time (though the number of repetitions varies). I have also now observed the problem happen _while_ playing sound. In that scenario, the sound card keeps replaying the last few hundred milliseconds of sound until pulseaudio is killed.

[marduk (dennis-schwan)]

I have exactly the same problem.

For me it happens every third day or so.

Is there a fix for this already?

[wader (mattias-wadman)]

Looks very similar to bug #288093