pulseaudio deeply unreliable (Fedora 10)

[Neil Bird]

   OK, I've had a google, and a bit of tinkering with config. files, and I'm 
not really getting anywhere.  PA was working OK for me in Fedora 8, but ever 
since I upgraded F8 to F10, it's been a right PITA.

   It'll either continually stutter (e.g., when playing music often 1-2 
times each track) or hiccough and crash under CPU load (firefox loading can 
kill it, for example).

   Indeed, with my wife playing 'listen', CPU usage is PA itself is some 
~20% or more.  I have tried the 'tsched=0' hack, but that doesn't seem to 
change anything (yes, I restarted PA).


   I've seen PA quit itself due to "excessive CPU usage" (I've taken to 
running it in an xterm to see when it's gone/what errors it's reporting).  I 
tried the max cpu flag I found in the PA daemon conf. file, but all *that* 
did was just report 'Killed' when it died.

   It just seems deeply unreliable.  I can fairly reliably stuff it by 
running realplay (listening to streamed radio) under padsp, and then 
launching mplayer.

   The only odd thing I see is some message about the ALSA and/or the kernel 
reporting a range of 22.0 to 22.0 db or something, "indicating a bug in the 
kernel driver".


   So, what to try?  Most googles of my symptoms lead to people who've had 
enough and removed it.  I did even see one report trying to blame nVidia's 
drivers (which, regardless of veracity, is no excuse given that it was OK 
before).

   I'd *rather* get to the bottom of the problem(s), even if it's raising 
bug reports and patching for now, but I'm really just fed up with the thing 
now.  If I can't get it going within a week, next weekend it's off the 
machine for good.

-- 
[neil at fnx ~]# rm -f .signature
[neil at fnx ~]# ls -l .signature
ls: .signature: No such file or directory
[neil at fnx ~]# exit