[Pkg-pulseaudio-devel] Bug#505097: pulseaudio: eats CPU. CPU usage increase over time

[Gennady Kupava]

After upgrading my router (old 600Mhz celeron PC), which is also my 24/7
network sound server with pulseaudio from etch to lenny, I've got
similar very annoying problem.

After few hours (always if router was working overnight), I am getting
jerks with any freshly run client, so I have to go router with ssh and
manually restart pulseaudio service, after that it works for the next
few hours. I can't recall if any connected client get this jerks in
middle of it's work, even sometimes I have low volume music or video
playing for the long time. Observations on router tell me that just
after restart, playing same thing on client (client is different machine
with ethernet connection to router) - ape with mplayer takes ~27.4 with
freshly restarted pulseaudio, as far as I saw last time jerks happen
than cpu usage is too high.

So, I far as I can see, pulseaudio CPU usage is increasing over time,
and that seem several bug. Also this is somehow related to idle time.

Also, it eats CPU while idle.

PA is running with CPU limit off.

The client system seems were not changed except that it is unstable
debian.

Up-to-date Lenny setup:
Package: pulseaudio
Architecture: i386
Version: 0.9.10-3


router2:~# cat /etc/pulse/daemon.conf|egrep -v '(^#|$^|;)'
verbose = 0
high-priority = 1
disallow-module-loading = 1

router2:~# cat /etc/pulse/default.pa|egrep -v '(^#|$^|;)'
load-module module-alsa-sink device=default
.ifexists /usr/lib/pulse-0.9/modules/module-esound-protocol-unix.so
.endif
load-module module-native-protocol-unix auth-anonymous=1
load-module module-native-protocol-tcp  auth-anonymous=1
load-module module-volume-restore
load-module module-rescue-streams
.nofail

I did oprofile some time ago, but this seem not very informative:
router2:~# opreport 
CPU: CPU with timer interrupt, speed 0 MHz (estimated)
Profiling through timer interrupt
          TIMER:0|
  samples|      %|
------------------
     1477 92.1397 no-vmlinux
       39  2.4329 libasound.so.2.0.0
       34  2.1210 libpulsecore.so.5.0.1
       29  1.8091 libc-2.7.so
        5  0.3119 module-alsa-sink.so
        4  0.2495 libpthread-2.7.so
        4  0.2495 ld-2.7.so
        3  0.1871 dash
        3  0.1871 pulseaudio
                  TIMER:0|
          samples|      %|
        ------------------
                3 100.000 [vdso] (tgid:18758
range:0xb7f96000-0xb7f97000)
        1  0.0624 libproc-3.2.7.so
        1  0.0624 gawk
        1  0.0624 oprofiled
        1  0.0624 top
        1  0.0624 sshd
                  TIMER:0|
          samples|      %|
        ------------------
                1 100.000 [vdso] (tgid:16862
range:0xb7ee8000-0xb7ee9000)
router2:~# opcontrol --status
Daemon not running
Separate options: none
vmlinux file: none
Image filter: none
Call-graph depth: 0

Thank you for debian!