Currently, after a massive flood of underruns (crazy amounts of system load, for example), PA can get into a state where playback remains choppy even after the cause of the underruns has gone away. The only way this gets "fixed" is if we give PA time to suspend (i.e. close) the ALSA device and reopen it.
I think I am seeing this same problem since we updated PA in Guacamayo from 1.2 to 2.1. Playing a video, fairly regularly the sound just cuts out; when it happens, I see the following in the syslog: Dec 13 16:35:34 atom-pc user.debug pulseaudio[1057]: [alsa-sink] protocol-native.c: Underrun on ''Sintel Trailer' by 'Durian Open Movie Team'', 0 bytes in queue. Dec 13 16:35:35 atom-pc user.debug pulseaudio[1057]: [alsa-sink] ratelimit.c: 99 events suppressed Dec 13 16:35:35 atom-pc user.debug pulseaudio[1057]: [alsa-sink] flist.c: pulsecore/memblockq.c: list_items flist is full (don't worry) With the last message repeating again and again. I am not clear on the cause of the under runs, but it's not load CPU related. If I restart the playback from the beginning, the sound is working again.
PA 3.0 also suffers from this issue, which makes is unusable on any media appliance.
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