[Bug 476702] Re: Audio has occasional skips/dropouts

[Vanessa Ezekowitz]

I'm using Gentoo now, and this bug persists even with vanilla kernel
2.6.33.2 (the current stable version as of this post)  It affects every
kernel I've tried up to this version, under both Ubuntu and Gentoo, so
obviously is isn't Ubuntu's fault.

It seems to have gotten somewhat better with the more recent kernels -
the skips aren't nearly as severe or as likely to happen.  There also
seems to be a pattern emerging, in that CPU load clearly makes the
problem worse.  Continuous heavy CPU load (such as an ongoing build)
generally causes repeated, large (maybe 0.1 to 0.2 second) skips every
few seconds, while sudden spikes (such as rendering a page in Firefox)
might just cause a single, brief hiccup.   It's still an intermittent
problem - whatever condition it is that makes the skips possible doesn't
always seems to be in place, but I still haven't figured out what that
is.

High network activity, or spikes in network activity may also make the
problem worse, but I haven't been able to pin that down yet either.  I
mention this only because the affected machine gets most of its music
data from an NFS share on another machine, and on many occasions, a CPU
spike on that machine is accompanied by a natural spike in network load
(download a web page, then render it, for example).

-- 
Audio has occasional skips/dropouts
https://bugs.launchpad.net/bugs/476702
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