pulseaudio deeply unreliable (Fedora 10)

[Phil Meyer]

Neil Bird wrote:
>
>   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).
>

Stutter is still there, but all of my crashes are gone now.

>   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).
>
Yes, excessive CPU overhead is still there -- average about 17% for me 
on three systems of various CPU types.  All three at 17%.  Weird.
>
>   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.

As mentioned, those no longer occur for me with the last two updates.

Because 'pulse' and alsa can co-exist, setting the music player to alsa 
stops the skipping, but no other audio will work at the same time, 
sometimes causing a flash player or pidgin, or other app to crash as a 
result.

I have tested this extensively with several music players, and set to 
alsa, they consume less than 5% CPU, and set to pulse they use 17%. 

Set to alsa they perform flawlessly, while blocking all other audio.

Set to pulse, they all skip and stutter during playback at irregular 
intervals and no indication of high bus, disk, or memory use.

So currently, the choices are to fall back to alsa and esd (yuck), or 
stick to pulse and grit your teeth every time it skips/stutters during 
playback.

Audio tracks in DVD play also stutter. :(

Progress has been made, and will continue to be made, but in the mean 
time, the choices are not great.

Good luck!