pulseaudio slows down natty (presumably) after a crash in the audio system

[Gabriele N. Tornetta]

Binary package hint: pulseaudio

Description:
While playing a media file (video/audio) with any player (totem, rhythmbox, vlc, ...) playback halt for a while, everything becomes slow as though a process has spawn in background, locking all the system resources. Then i hear the sound of the hard-disk spinning as though being busy with some I/O operations. Ultimately the system freezes and the only remedy is a manual reboot. If I hit Ctrl+Alt+BkSpace at the onset of this issue I get some chances of rebooting X to the login screen.

How to reproduce:
*Login into natty
*Enable pulseaudio (if not enabled/installed)
*Open a player, e.g. vlc, and reproduce some audio/video
*Wait for a while untill playback halt for a few seconds. Then the os becomes unusable.

A possible solution:
*"autospawn=no" pulseaudio
*kill the daemon (pulseaudio -k)

Further remarks:
The solution outlined above is what led me to conclude that the problem is related to pulseaudio. There are some chances that this is an hardware-related bug, for it seems that this isn't a common bug (also see https://bugs.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+source/xserver-xorg-video-intel/+bug/787208). Sometimes, even when using alsa (i.e. with pulseaudio disabled), rhythmbox crashes and vlc playback interrupts abruptly for no reasons. This fact led me to conclude that there must be a problem related to the "audio system" (at x server level maybe, I'm not sure...) that causes some crashes, and the reaction of the pulseaudio daemon is "bad", in the sense discussed above.

ProblemType: Bug
DistroRelease: Ubuntu 11.04
Package: pulseaudio 1:0.9.22+stable-queue-24-g67d18-0ubuntu3.1
ProcVersionSignature: Ubuntu 2.6.38-8.42-generic 2.6.38.2
Uname: Linux 2.6.38-8-generic i686
AlsaVersion: Advanced Linux Sound Architecture Driver Version 1.0.23.
Architecture: i386
AudioDevicesInUse: Error: command ['fuser', '-v', '/dev/snd/by-path', '/dev/snd/controlC0', '/dev/snd/pcmC0D0c', '/dev/snd/pcmC0D0p', '/dev/snd/pcmC0D1c', '/dev/snd/pcmC0D2c', '/dev/snd/pcmC0D3c', '/dev/snd/pcmC0D4p', '/dev/snd/seq', '/dev/snd/timer'] failed with exit code 1:
Card0.Amixer.info:
 Card hw:0 'ICH6'/'Intel ICH6 with Cx20468-31 at irq 17'
   Mixer name : 'Conexant Cx20468-31'
   Components : 'AC97a:43585430'
   Controls : 23
   Simple ctrls : 16
Date: Sun Jun 19 11:48:54 2011
InstallationMedia: Ubuntu 10.04 LTS "Lucid Lynx" - Release i386 (20100429)
ProcEnviron:
 LANGUAGE=en_US:en
 LANG=en_US.UTF-8
 SHELL=/bin/bash
SourcePackage: pulseaudio
UpgradeStatus: Upgraded to natty on 2011-04-28 (51 days ago)
dmi.bios.date: 09/12/2005
dmi.bios.vendor: Hewlett-Packard
dmi.bios.version: F.12
dmi.board.name: 308F
dmi.board.vendor: Quanta
dmi.board.version: 46.11
dmi.chassis.type: 10
dmi.chassis.vendor: Quanta
dmi.chassis.version: N/A
dmi.modalias: dmi:bvnHewlett-Packard:bvrF.12:bd09/12/2005:svnHewlett-Packard:pnHPPaviliondv1000(EK893EA#ABZ):pvrRev1:rvnQuanta:rn308F:rvr46.11:cvnQuanta:ct10:cvrN/A:
dmi.product.name: HP Pavilion dv1000 (EK893EA#ABZ)
dmi.product.version: Rev 1
dmi.sys.vendor: Hewlett-Packard

[Gabriele N. Tornetta (phoenix1987)]

Maybe this bug is not so hardware-dependend as i originally thought. The same issued presented itself on a completely different machine. I presume that I'm not the only one with this bug, and that it'd been already reported under different tags.

[Daniel T Chen (crimsun)]

It's definitely hardware-related, as pulse itself is incapable of taking down a system without hw access (which points to the sound driver [or core/pcm layer] or RT). Can you reproduce this symptom using https://wiki.ubuntu.com/Audio/InstallingLinuxAlsaDriverModules?

[Gabriele N. Tornetta (phoenix1987)]

I'm sorry maybe i used the wrong words. With hardware-independency I mean that the occurence of the bug does not depend on the particular hardware a machine is mounting (e.g. ati or intel video card). I said that this problem is somewhat hardware-independent because this bug occurred on two very different machines (a desktop with ati video card, and a laptop with intel video card,...).

I was trying to find post on the net describing a bug similar to the one I reported here. This thread http://ubuntuforums.org/showthread.php?p=10971723#post10971723 on UbuntuForums seems to be somehow related to this issue.

[Launchpad Janitor (janitor)]

[Expired for pulseaudio (Ubuntu) because there has been no activity for 60 days.]