On Sat, 23.05.09 12:09, Brian J. Murrell (brian at interlinx.bc.ca) wrote: > I have started to see something happening quite reproducibly (as in near > 100%) for some strange reason. Nothing here has changed, but this has > started happening. > > I have rhythmbox playing. I pause. I resume. I get all kinds of > "crackling", then it starts playing, then pulseaudio quits. > > Just now, I had it do it again, this time no crackling, but here's the > debug from pulseaudio -vvvv: > > Soft CPU time limit exhausted, terminating. > E: cpulimit.c: Received request to terminate due to CPU overload. > I: main.c: Daemon shutdown initiated. This is the problem. Due to some reason PA starts to each a lot of CPU time in which case PA's load limiter will become active and ask it to commit suicide. Or actually this is just a symptom of a problem. What the actual problem might be difficult to tell. PA starts to spin in some busy loop for some reason. That might be a driver problem, might be a PA problem, might be simply a client that asks for very low latency (and hence high CPU load). Could you please to the following: 1) Add a system load monitor applet to your panel, so that you can monitor if your CPU is idle or not. 2) Terminate PA in a terminal: $ pulseaudio -k 3) In the same terminal start PA with debbuging output on and the load limiter off: $ pulseaudio -vvvvv -no-cpu-limit 4) Try to reproduce the issue, watch the load monitor applet. Does CPU load go up to 100% for longer time? if so, please open another terminal, type "pacmd ls" and paste the output somwhere. Is this an USB audio device? Driver? Could you please dump the start of the PA log output somewhere (i.e. the part that shows the initialization phase)? Which PA evrsion is this? Lennart -- Lennart Poettering Red Hat, Inc. lennart [at] poettering [dot] net http://0pointer.net/lennart/ GnuPG 0x1A015CC4