Created attachment 360090 [details] pacmd 'ls' output Description of problem: I had a lot of 'play' processes hogging cpu. This happened when I had a voip call in progress on ekiga and a few alerts were sounded. Interestingly, I have alerts to 'muted' but they sounded nevertheless in this instance. More interestingly, there was nothing in the 'output' sound preferences tab when the ekiga call had just started. Maybe pulseaudio died and came back and couldn't sync with what was happening? I will attach pacmd 'ls' output. Pasting /var/log/messages and top output here: (starts from the time the ekiga call started) /var/log/messages Sep 8 19:36:03 amit-x200 pulseaudio[2237]: alsa-source.c: Increasing minimal latency to 1.00 ms Sep 8 19:36:08 amit-x200 pulseaudio[2237]: alsa-source.c: Increasing minimal latency to 2.00 ms Sep 8 19:36:09 amit-x200 pulseaudio[2237]: alsa-source.c: Increasing minimal latency to 4.00 ms Sep 8 19:36:38 amit-x200 pulseaudio[2237]: alsa-source.c: Increasing minimal latency to 8.00 ms Sep 8 19:37:41 amit-x200 pulseaudio[2237]: alsa-sink.c: Error opening PCM device front:0: Device or resource busy Sep 8 19:37:41 amit-x200 pulseaudio[2237]: sink-input.c: Failed to create sink input: sink is suspended. Sep 8 19:37:41 amit-x200 pulseaudio[2237]: alsa-source.c: Increasing minimal latency to 16.00 ms Sep 8 19:37:47 amit-x200 pulseaudio[2237]: alsa-sink.c: Error opening PCM device front:0: Device or resource busy Sep 8 19:37:47 amit-x200 pulseaudio[2237]: sink-input.c: Failed to create sink input: sink is suspended. Sep 8 19:37:58 amit-x200 pulseaudio[2237]: alsa-source.c: Increasing minimal latency to 26.00 ms Sep 8 19:39:14 amit-x200 pulseaudio[2237]: alsa-source.c: Increasing wakeup watermark to 15.99 ms Sep 8 19:39:36 amit-x200 pulseaudio[2237]: alsa-source.c: Increasing minimal latency to 36.00 ms Sep 8 19:40:14 amit-x200 pulseaudio[2237]: alsa-source.c: Increasing wakeup watermark to 25.99 ms Sep 8 19:44:34 amit-x200 pulseaudio[2237]: alsa-sink.c: Error opening PCM device front:0: Device or resource busy Sep 8 19:44:34 amit-x200 pulseaudio[2237]: alsa-sink.c: Error opening PCM device front:0: Device or resource busy Sep 8 19:44:38 amit-x200 pulseaudio[2237]: alsa-sink.c: Error opening PCM device front:0: Device or resource busy Sep 8 19:44:38 amit-x200 pulseaudio[2237]: sink-input.c: Failed to create sink input: sink is suspended. Sep 8 19:44:59 amit-x200 pulseaudio[2237]: alsa-sink.c: Error opening PCM device front:0: Device or resource busy Sep 8 19:44:59 amit-x200 pulseaudio[2237]: sink-input.c: Failed to create sink input: sink is suspended. Sep 8 19:45:18 amit-x200 pulseaudio[2237]: alsa-sink.c: Error opening PCM device front:0: Device or resource busy Sep 8 19:45:18 amit-x200 pulseaudio[2237]: sink-input.c: Failed to create sink input: sink is suspended. Sep 8 19:45:21 amit-x200 pulseaudio[2237]: alsa-sink.c: Error opening PCM device front:0: Device or resource busy Sep 8 19:45:21 amit-x200 pulseaudio[2237]: sink-input.c: Failed to create sink input: sink is suspended. ... Sep 8 20:11:42 amit-x200 pulseaudio[2237]: alsa-sink.c: Error opening PCM device front:0: Device or resource busy Sep 8 20:11:42 amit-x200 pulseaudio[2237]: alsa-sink.c: Error opening PCM device front:0: Device or resource busy Sep 8 20:11:42 amit-x200 pulseaudio[2237]: alsa-sink.c: Error opening PCM device front:0: Device or resource busy Sep 8 20:11:43 amit-x200 pulseaudio[2237]: alsa-sink.c: Error opening PCM device front:0: Device or resource busy Sep 8 20:12:29 amit-x200 pulseaudio[2237]: alsa-sink.c: Error opening PCM device front:0: Device or resource busy Sep 8 20:12:29 amit-x200 pulseaudio[2237]: sink-input.c: Failed to create sink input: sink is suspended. Sep 8 20:12:33 amit-x200 pulseaudio[2237]: alsa-sink.c: Error opening PCM device front:0: Device or resource busy Sep 8 20:12:33 amit-x200 pulseaudio[2237]: sink-input.c: Failed to create sink input: sink is suspended. Sep 8 20:14:02 amit-x200 pulseaudio[2237]: alsa-sink.c: Error opening PCM device front:0: Device or resource busy Sep 8 20:14:02 amit-x200 pulseaudio[2237]: alsa-sink.c: Error opening PCM device front:0: Device or resource busy Sep 8 20:14:12 amit-x200 pulseaudio[2237]: alsa-sink.c: Error opening PCM device front:0: Device or resource busy Sep 8 20:14:12 amit-x200 pulseaudio[2237]: alsa-sink.c: Error opening PCM device front:0: Device or resource busy Sep 8 20:14:31 amit-x200 pulseaudio[2237]: alsa-sink.c: Error opening PCM device front:0: Device or resource busy Sep 8 20:14:31 amit-x200 pulseaudio[2237]: sink-input.c: Failed to create sink input: sink is suspended. Sep 8 20:14:32 amit-x200 pulseaudio[2237]: alsa-sink.c: Error opening PCM device front:0: Device or resource busy Sep 8 20:14:32 amit-x200 pulseaudio[2237]: sink-input.c: Failed to create sink input: sink is suspended. Sep 8 20:15:22 amit-x200 pulseaudio[2237]: alsa-sink.c: Error opening PCM device front:0: Device or resource busy Sep 8 20:15:22 amit-x200 pulseaudio[2237]: sink-input.c: Failed to create sink input: sink is suspended. Sep 8 20:15:30 amit-x200 pulseaudio[2237]: alsa-sink.c: Error opening PCM device front:0: Device or resource busy Sep 8 20:15:30 amit-x200 pulseaudio[2237]: sink-input.c: Failed to create sink input: sink is suspended. Sep 8 20:15:42 amit-x200 pulseaudio[2237]: alsa-sink.c: Error opening PCM device front:0: Device or resource busy Sep 8 20:15:42 amit-x200 pulseaudio[2237]: sink-input.c: Failed to create sink input: sink is suspended. top output: top - 20:16:23 up 10:59, 11 users, load average: 16.50, 13.00, 7.83 Tasks: 200 total, 18 running, 182 sleeping, 0 stopped, 0 zombie Cpu(s): 7.8%us, 3.6%sy, 0.0%ni, 87.5%id, 1.0%wa, 0.0%hi, 0.0%si, 0.0%st Mem: 3912008k total, 3203780k used, 708228k free, 324404k buffers Swap: 5963768k total, 2876k used, 5960892k free, 1714916k cached PID USER PR NI VIRT RES SHR S %CPU %MEM TIME+ COMMAND 10582 amit 20 0 346m 4196 3212 R 15.7 0.1 5:02.08 play 10661 amit 20 0 346m 4196 3212 R 13.7 0.1 2:59.62 play 10831 amit 20 0 346m 4196 3212 R 13.7 0.1 0:16.74 play 10504 amit 20 0 346m 4192 3212 R 11.8 0.1 12:02.24 play 10566 amit 20 0 346m 4196 3212 R 11.8 0.1 5:33.68 play 10700 amit 20 0 346m 4192 3212 R 11.8 0.1 2:25.91 play 10709 amit 20 0 346m 4192 3212 R 11.8 0.1 2:18.76 play 10755 amit 20 0 346m 4192 3212 R 11.8 0.1 1:33.07 play 10762 amit 20 0 346m 4192 3212 R 11.8 0.1 1:31.16 play 10800 amit 20 0 346m 4196 3212 R 11.8 0.1 0:36.04 play 10805 amit 20 0 346m 4192 3212 R 11.8 0.1 0:35.69 play 10808 amit 20 0 346m 4192 3212 R 11.8 0.1 0:36.61 play 10953 amit 20 0 346m 4196 3212 R 11.8 0.1 0:02.36 play 10835 amit 20 0 346m 4220 3240 R 9.8 0.1 0:15.42 play 10445 amit 20 0 346m 4192 3212 R 7.8 0.1 17:51.61 play 10765 amit 20 0 346m 4196 3212 R 7.8 0.1 1:26.59 play 10771 amit 20 0 346m 4192 3212 R 7.8 0.1 1:05.77 play 1 root 20 0 4080 852 592 S 0.0 0.0 0:01.35 init
When this happens, pulseaudio is obviously not in use: (from another run:) fuser /dev/snd/* /dev/snd/controlC0: 2233 /dev/snd/pcmC0D0c: 11999m /dev/snd/pcmC0D0p: 11999m 2233 is pulseaudio but 11999 is ekiga. $ rpm -q alsa-plugins-pulseaudio alsa-plugins-pulseaudio-1.0.21-2.fc11.x86_64 I also checked running with 'padsp' but that didn't make any difference. So there might be two bugs: one is pulseaudio hogging the cpu and second is ekiga not using pulseaudio. I don't know if the latter is an ekiga bug or a pulseaudio bug.
Whcih version of PA is this? PA in F12 actually refuses to open an audio device that is opened by at least one other process. In F11 we try to open the audio device each time a client wants to play something. So if you have this spinning loop here this probably means that some clients are constantly asking pa to play something? Note that disabling "Window and Input sounds" in g-v-c does not disable all event sounds. that is what selecting the "off" theme is for.
pulseaudio-0.9.15-17.fc11.x86_64 What seems to be happening is ekiga claims ownership of the snd devices so centerim can't play its audio. The 'play' processes then get stuck, repeatedly trying to write to the output stream and go away. But that doesn't happen. Also, when ekiga claims ownership of the snd devices, none of pulseaudio's settings seem to take effect: input mic volume gets restored to what ekiga sets instead of the value set from Sound Preferences. And that's also true for the event sounds, which do not get emitted when ekiga is not playing. Only when ekiga is started, the event sounds come up. (Since under Sound Preferences, event sounds are muted.)
So, it seems Ekiga is bypassing PA? Why is it doing that? Did you configure it that way? Can you make sure to configure it to use PA?
I haven't configured ekiga to not use PA. In fact, there's no setting that I see that mandates the use of PA in ekiga. The Audio devices presented are: SILENT(ekiga/ekiga) Default(PTLIB/ALSA) HDA INTEL(PTLIB/ALSA) (*) HDA INTEL (1) (PTLIB/ALSA) and I have it configured it for the one marked with the asterisk for all -- ringing device, output device and input device.
I think when you specify an input or output device in Ekiga, it explicitly uses that device via ALSA, which would bypass the automatic routing of audio to and from ALSA's *default* devices to PA which we implement with /etc/alsa/pulse-default.conf . That's how I read it, anyway. I'm not sure if there's anything PA can do about this, we can't really start intercepting apps which try to talk to ALSA directly, since there may be valid reasons for that in some circumstances. As far as I can see the 'fix' for this is the later version of Ekiga / opal with native PA support. Lennart, do you agree with my reading of this? -- Fedora Bugzappers volunteer triage team https://fedoraproject.org/wiki/BugZappers
(In reply to comment #6) > I think when you specify an input or output device in Ekiga, it explicitly uses > that device via ALSA, which would bypass the automatic routing of audio to and > from ALSA's *default* devices to PA which we implement with > /etc/alsa/pulse-default.conf . That's how I read it, anyway. Aha, that seems to be the case. I switched ekiga to use the Default device and that uses pulseaudio. I've not tested this by making a call yet, but there must be some reason why I switched to the non-default device. I'll try making a call and report back or close the Bug. Thanks!
With those settings and the new ekiga (3.6 in F11-updates), all works fine. Thanks again!