Public bug reported:
Binary package hint: pulseaudio
When pavucontrol is open, and occasionally when it isn't, Pulseaudio
leaks memory and frequently goes into a loop.
When pulseaudio is first started, virtual memory usage is about 156MB,
while actual memory only around 1.2MB. From there, a few different
scenarios may occur:
1) I start pavucontrol. Immediately, pulseaudio's memory usage jumps by
0.4MB, which is never freed. Usually it also immediately starts skipping
and popping slightly.
2a) I then close pavucontrol. Memory usage does not go back down. Within 2-3
minutes, audio decoding fails for some time. pulseaudio enters a loop in which
CPU usage is ~50%, memory is allocated at about 5MB/sec, and output is mostly
clicks and pops. Display in Sonata or mplayer show rapidly advancing through
the file.
During this time, syslog shows several messages:
Jan 18 22:59:01 mercury pulseaudio[19654]: ratelimit.c: 22944 events suppressed
number of events varies from about 300 to over 20,000.
This loop lasts for about 1 to 10 seconds, depending how long pavucontrol was
left open. If the player is not stopped, it re-occurs every 4-8 minutes. About
half of the allocated memory may or may not be freed when the player is stopped.
Afterward, the same message appears every 5-10 seconds in syslog, but number of
events is less than 10.
2b) I leave pavucontrol open. Memory usage slowly climbs for about 8
minutes, then again enters a loop. The loop continues until pavucontrol
is closed, even if the player is stopped, or until memory usage reaches
~120MB, at which point playback stops entirely. The memory is not freed.
Stopping and restarting the player still produces garbage output, unless
pavucontrol is closed first.
3) Occasionally, even if pavucontrol is not installed, this same loop occurs. I
have only seen this when playing in mplayer. Several months ago it suddenly
started to happen frequently, after about 4-8 minutes of playback; at that time
mplayer was the only audio player I used which used Pulseaudio. I'm not certain
what caused the issue to appear at that time, but it stopped when I upgraded
Xubuntu with a fresh reinstall and did not reinstall Pulseaudio. Since
installing it again today this has happened twice even before installing
pavucontrol, both times in mplayer.
In this scenario, the solution is to close mplayer and start it again. I have
not been able to observe memory/CPU usage during this scenario.
On occasion starting pavucontrol does not trigger this issue, but
closing it and opening it again will, within a minute.
Sound card listing:
$ aplay -l
**** List of PLAYBACK Hardware Devices ****
card 0: CMI8738 [C-Media CMI8738], device 0: CMI8738 [C-Media PCI DAC/ADC]
Subdevices: 1/1
Subdevice #0: subdevice #0
card 0: CMI8738 [C-Media CMI8738], device 1: CMI8738 [C-Media PCI 2nd DAC]
Subdevices: 1/1
Subdevice #0: subdevice #0
card 0: CMI8738 [C-Media CMI8738], device 2: CMI8738 [C-Media PCI IEC958]
Subdevices: 1/1
Subdevice #0: subdevice #0
OS: Xubuntu 9.10 x86
PulseAudio version: 1:0.9.19-0ubuntu4
pavucontrol version: 0.9.8+git20090701-0ubuntu2
** Affects: pulseaudio (Ubuntu)
Importance: Undecided
Status: New
** Tags: audio decoding loop memoryleak pavucontrol pulseaudio ratelimit.c
syslog
--
Pulseaudio memory leak/crash, reproducible using pavucontrol
https://bugs.launchpad.net/bugs/509493
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