Bug 391990

Summary: PulseAudio stuttering sound when switching windows
Product: [openSUSE] openSUSE 11.0 Reporter: Casual J. Programmer <casualprogrammer>
Component: GNOMEAssignee: Rodrigo Moya <rodrigo>
Status: RESOLVED DUPLICATE QA Contact: E-mail List <qa-bugs>
Severity: Major    
Priority: P5 - None CC: bjohnson, mmeeks
Version: Factory   
Target Milestone: ---   
Hardware: x86   
OS: openSUSE 11.0   
Whiteboard:
Found By: Beta-Customer Services Priority:
Business Priority: Blocker: ---
Marketing QA Status: --- IT Deployment: ---

Description Casual J. Programmer 2008-05-19 11:11:46 UTC
After clean install from Beta3 DVD & update from factory music playing gets stuttering while windows are switched or volumes mounted / unmounted. 

Notebook: Sony Vaio PCG-SRX51P
Graphics: Intel I815
Monitor:  Sony LCD Monitor 1024x768@60Hz
Wireless: Lucent WaveLAN/IEEE ORiNOCO mini PCI
Sound:    Intel 82801BA/BAM AC'97 Audio Controller
Desktop:  gnome-desktop-2.22.1-17
YaST GUI: package yast2-qt is not installed
OS:       openSUSE 11.0 (i586) Beta3 VERSION = 11.0
Kernel:   2.6.25.3-2-pae

rpm -qa | grep pulseaudio | sort

pulseaudio-0.9.10-14
pulseaudio-esound-compat-0.9.10-14
pulseaudio-module-bluetooth-0.9.10-14
pulseaudio-module-gconf-0.9.10-14
pulseaudio-module-lirc-0.9.10-14
pulseaudio-module-x11-0.9.10-14
pulseaudio-module-zeroconf-0.9.10-14
pulseaudio-utils-0.9.10-14
Comment 1 Casual J. Programmer 2008-05-19 11:12:55 UTC
CPU is Intel(R) Pentium(R) III Mobile CPU 800MHz with 512 MB of RAM
Comment 2 JP Rosevear 2008-05-19 13:16:54 UTC
I think this is a dupe.
Comment 3 Casual J. Programmer 2008-05-19 15:26:04 UTC
Could well be, I thought I heard something, but couldn't find a matching bug :-(
Comment 4 Michael Meeks 2008-05-28 13:47:53 UTC
My PII 366 128Mb has a constant stutter despite apparently having spare CPU here.
Notably esd doesn't have the same problem - and uses 2x orders of magnitude longer buffers to the sound card.
Comment 5 Michael Meeks 2008-05-28 14:35:27 UTC
Interestingly, gstreamer-properties "Test" signal stutters just as badly as banshee: and it's not (apparently) writing data en-mass to the daemon either. So (apparently) the daemon is quite good at stuttering without outside input ;-)
Comment 6 Michael Meeks 2008-05-29 15:38:12 UTC
Interestingly the Fedora strace JP sent me also shows these ridiculously tiny fragment sizes:

2661  recvmsg(37, {msg_name(0)=NULL, msg_iov(1)=[{"\0\0\0\10\323W&\271\0\1\3000\0\0\1\364", 16}], msg_controllen=24, {cmsg_len=24, cmsg_level=SOL_SOCKET, cmsg_type=SCM_CREDENTIALS{pid=2831, uid=500, gid=500}}, msg_flags=0}, 0) = 16

eg. so - I guess it's not just us ;-)

As a punt in the dark: I would guess that we should sacrifice all these theoretical nicities of "low-latency" that ~few people cares about for "doesn't click" which annoys ~everyone ;-)
Comment 7 Rodrigo Moya 2008-05-30 09:15:17 UTC
I think your Dell laptop has the ac_97 sound card, so this might be helpful:

http://dev.compiz-fusion.org/~wfarr/viewpost?id=22

does it change anything?
Comment 8 Rodrigo Moya 2008-05-30 09:41:10 UTC
I was seeing this stuttering sound while switching workspaces very quickly with the keybindings. With this:

options snd_intel8x0 ac97_clock=48000

in /etc/modprobe.conf.local, and I can't replicate it anymore, so I guess it really helps. Let's see what Michael says about his very old laptop. Casual, does this fix the issue for you?
Comment 9 Casual J. Programmer 2008-05-30 10:59:30 UTC
options snd_intel8x0 ac97_clock=48000

doesn't seem to make much of a difference, I must say that on the Sony Mini-Notebook the whole of 11.0 is rather slowish and as I am testing with Banshee it might also come from influencing the buffering, need to test it with an audio CD as well..

Maybe it would be worth checking just why running 11.0 on a reasonably well equipped Notebook would meet such severe performance issues. I am running Windows XP on Pentium with reasonable results...
Comment 10 Casual J. Programmer 2008-05-30 11:55:06 UTC
Doesn't make any difference playing a music CD either ( imported to fixed disk and playing with Banshee ).
Comment 11 Blake Johnson 2008-06-24 19:15:48 UTC
Try this one.  https://bugzilla.novell.com/show_bug.cgi?id=392037
Comment 12 JP Rosevear 2008-07-02 21:12:06 UTC
CJP, is the referenced bug in #11 any help?
Comment 13 Casual J. Programmer 2008-07-03 05:06:52 UTC
Yes, 392037 seems to be an exact duplicate of this one. 
The problem is gone for me too, thanks to Blake for pointing it out
Comment 14 Rodrigo Moya 2008-07-03 12:18:05 UTC
DUP'ing then

*** This bug has been marked as a duplicate of bug 392037 ***