Sudden sound performance problem
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I've been running Debian full-time on my desktop for over a year now, with a
combination of testing and unstable (mostly testing). At the moment I'm
running 2.6.15, compiled with Debian's default config except for turning on
a couple of things so I could use the atop monitor. I've used ALSA from
the very beginning with my two SB Live! Value cards, and it works
perfectly.
Well, it has, but in just the past week I've noticed very strange audio
performance problems. If CPU usage spikes for a few seconds, the audio
tends to skip (when I'm listening to XMMS, for example). This has *never*
happened before.
Another thing that happens is that if I'm watching a video, and the video
player app freezes (which hasn't happened like this until now, either), the
audio will loop over about a quarter-second's data until either it gets
more audio to play, or the app that was playing it is killed. It sounds
like the same kind of thing that happens if you're listening to something
and the whole computer freezes, except the rest of the system is not
frozen, and it can be stopped by killing the app.
I looked through my apt-listchanges logs for anything ALSA-related, but I
came up empty. I'll do some more digging and see if I can find any other
audio-decoding libs that might have been upgraded in the timeframe, but I
wondered if anyone else has experienced this too.
I'm not sure if this is related, but at the same time, I've noticed that
some apps like amarok, Kaffeine with the Xine engine, and perhaps others,
have been freezing up completely, usually while switching from one track or
video to the next, or sometimes in the middle of a video. This behavior is
also new.
I realize that using testing, and especially unstable, results in strange
problems like this now and then. But I would like to help solve it,
especially if I'm not the only one experiencing it. So any advice or
anecdotes would be appreciated.
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