Pulse Audio Causing Application Slowness and Shutdown Hang

NeonMeatDream · 2017-07-15 04:05:57

For about the past week I've been having problems with at least a couple of applications and shutdowns, and I'm hoping to get some advice on where I might be able to look to help narrow down the cause(s).

Things started to get weird after I performed a system upgrade a few days ago, and I initially thought that perhaps it was related to Systemd going from 232 to 233. I don't have any solid reason to know this, just suspicion based on various posts I read that talked about how sometimes its updates can introduce "bugs," and also because PulseAudio volume control is one of the apps that's been crashing, hanging with "Establishing connection to PulseAudio. Please wait..." and I'm supposing that PulseAudio is closely tied into Systemd, though I could well be wrong about that.

The other problems I noticed were:
- google chrome not being able to play You Tube videos though they worked fine before
- pcmanfm taking 30s or more to launch and subsequently to open a directory, but midnight commander not having any delay
- chrome, firefox and vivaldi all taking over 30s to launch when it used to be almost instant
- failure to shutdown or reboot with messages like
- "stop job running for user manager for UID 1000"
- "failed unmounting /run/user/1000"
- "failed unmounting temporary directory"

So I used "downgrade systemd" to revert back to version 232 to see if that would help, and it did at after the first reboot, but then the behaviors all resumed. Then I used downgrade again to go back to v233, and subsequently used TimeShift to roll the system back to before the Systemd upgrade, which also did not help.

During all of the application slowness I've been keeping an eye on Top, but there didn't seem to be anything hogging a bunch of CPU or RAM.

So at this point I feel kind of stuck, like I know enough to check things like top and maybe a few system logs, but not expert enough to really have an idea of where the problem may be coming from or what tools would be most likely to identify the issue(s). I'd appreciate any guidance, and thanks in advance.

Update: After uninstalling PulseAudio, all of the problems I noticed disappeared, and so I'm pretty certain PA is the cause. I'll be following seth's advice by reinstalling PA, disabling all services and looking for errors. Any other thoughts or experiences with this would be appreciated as well.

Last edited by NeonMeatDream (2017-07-17 06:05:33)

Docbroke · 2017-07-15 05:17:05

Have you seen this https://bbs.archlinux.org/viewtopic.php?id=228151

NeonMeatDream · 2017-07-15 06:26:34

Docbroke wrote:

Have you seen this https://bbs.archlinux.org/viewtopic.php?id=228151

I got similar results as mcloaked when I ran

systemctl stop tmp.mount

and

systemctl status tmp.mount

. I can post that output if you think it would be helpful.
When running

fuser -cu /tmp

as root in tty1, there was no output. In the morning I'll read up on fuser and lsof and see if I can get any info to show up about any processes.

seth · 2017-07-15 07:09:43

I/O timeouts?
Probably DBUS (talking to the session daemon?) or network - Did you look into your journal for repeated error messages?

NeonMeatDream · 2017-07-15 22:47:36

@Docbroke As of yet I haven't been able to find anything using fuser or lsof.

seth wrote:

I/O timeouts?
Probably DBUS (talking to the session daemon?) or network - Did you look into your journal for repeated error messages?

I'm not very familiar DBUS, so I'm reading up on that to get a better grasp of how it works. Probably sounds naive, but how would I see DBUS talking to the session daemon?

When looking through the journal, I see things like this

Jul 15 14:49:44 desktop systemd[700]: pulseaudio.service: Service hold-off time over, scheduling 
Jul 15 14:49:43 desktop systemd[700]: pulseaudio.service: Failed with result 'exit-code'.
Jul 15 14:49:43 desktop systemd[700]: pulseaudio.service: Unit entered failed state.
Jul 15 14:49:43 desktop systemd[700]: Failed to start Sound Service.
-- Subject: Unit UNIT has failed
-- Defined-By: systemd
-- Support: http://lists.freedesktop.org/mailman/listinfo/systemd-devel
-- 
-- Unit UNIT has failed.
-- 
-- The result is failed.
Jul 15 14:49:43 desktop systemd[700]: pulseaudio.service: Processes still around after final SIGK

and this

Call Trace:
Jul 15 14:42:18 desktop kernel: pulseaudio      D    0  1139    700 0x00000004
Jul 15 14:42:18 desktop kernel: "echo 0 > /proc/sys/kernel/hung_task_timeout_secs" disables this 
Jul 15 14:42:18 desktop kernel:       Tainted: G           O    4.11.6-3-ARCH #1
Jul 15 14:42:18 desktop kernel: INFO: task pulseaudio:1139 blocked for more than 120 seconds.

Are there certain filters I should run on journalctl to look for certain things?

Also I noticed the shutdown/reboot hang only happens when I start X, and not when I only log into the terminal and then shutdown.

seth · 2017-07-16 06:16:28

"things like this" isn't exactly helpful, but you've at least trouble with pulseaudio and it's waiting for an ioctl response (the "D", it's now a zombie process)
Either this is the cause (and processes wait for PA, fix: disable PA, solution: figure what's wrong with PA) or just a symptom.
Are there other processes with such state? Can you eg.

dbus-send --print-reply --system  --dest=org.freedesktop.systemd1 /org/freedesktop/systemd1 org.freedesktop.DBus.Introspectable.Introspect

Anything suspicious in dmesg (IO related failures etc.)?

NeonMeatDream · 2017-07-17 03:44:53

Couldn't find anything in dmesg resembling IO failures or anything else that looked suspicious.

The output of

dbus-send --print-reply --system  --dest=org.freedesktop.systemd1 /org/freedesktop/systemd1 org.freedesktop.DBus.Introspectable.Introspect

is here: http://codepad.org/WPnypSQA, though I'm not sure I understand its significance. Isn't this just the bus's interface details, and should the output contain some error info?

NeonMeatDream · 2017-07-17 03:53:55

Sorry, I meant to send this all as one post, but accidentally hit submit instead of preview.

I was about to say that maybe that doesn't even matter, because it appears PA is the cause. I removed it with pacman and rebooted, and both the application slowness and shutdown hang went away. So as you said I now need to figure out what's wrong with PA.

I'm not sure if it's proper to stay on this thread for working on that or if that counts as a new topic.

seth · 2017-07-17 05:21:40

The question was rather whether the bus responds at all (and instantly)

because it appears PA is the cause

Quelle surprise.

Edit the original post and notably the title to raise proper attention. Then, ifff (with many "f"s) you need it, re-install PA, disable all services (no idea whether it has any socket activation) and try to run pulseaudio by hand and watch the errors.
As you might have caught, my personal knowledge about PA is to stay away from it as far as possible (bad experience and I object the principle design) - sorry :-(

NeonMeatDream · 2017-07-17 06:09:45

OK I'll try reinstalling, and will likely give thought to staying away from it as well

And thanks for helping me get to this point.

Arch Linux

#1 2017-07-15 04:05:57

Pulse Audio Causing Application Slowness and Shutdown Hang

#2 2017-07-15 05:17:05

Re: Pulse Audio Causing Application Slowness and Shutdown Hang

#3 2017-07-15 06:26:34

Re: Pulse Audio Causing Application Slowness and Shutdown Hang

#4 2017-07-15 07:09:43

Re: Pulse Audio Causing Application Slowness and Shutdown Hang

#5 2017-07-15 22:47:36

Re: Pulse Audio Causing Application Slowness and Shutdown Hang

#6 2017-07-16 06:16:28

Re: Pulse Audio Causing Application Slowness and Shutdown Hang

#7 2017-07-17 03:44:53

Re: Pulse Audio Causing Application Slowness and Shutdown Hang

#8 2017-07-17 03:53:55

Re: Pulse Audio Causing Application Slowness and Shutdown Hang

#9 2017-07-17 05:21:40

Re: Pulse Audio Causing Application Slowness and Shutdown Hang

#10 2017-07-17 06:09:45

Re: Pulse Audio Causing Application Slowness and Shutdown Hang

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