Easyeffects process killed on idle #3699
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Do you see the message "killed" in your system logs? Run Have you installed any package with ananicy rules or something similar that could be affecting EasyEffects? In the past some users had problems because of that. But there are other cases where the reason why some users systems decide to kill EasyEffects remain unknown. For some reason I could never reproduce this kind of issue. |
Yessir. Bunch of
No ananicy. Really not much changed from a few months ago when easyeffects wasn't getting killed. I noticed something weird though. I have Grok tab open in Firefox oftentimes, and I just leave it open. Then I see easyeffects ramping up some CPU cycles (27%, i.e.) when everything is idle, and easyeffects showing Grok tab from Firefox as the only output source in the Output tab of easyeffects (even though no sound ever comes out of Grok). Kinda weird, maybe that's it? The kills start on Feb 23rd, around when I started using Grok 3 after it came out. |
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Ok, now it "exited" with Soundcloud and Youtube playing. This Firefox bug I have been seeing (https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1951237) may be related to this. |
Firefox sometimes keeps alive audio streams that do not seem to be doing anything. As strange as they are I have never seen they cause issues on my systems. The real source of the problem is probably something else.
Ok. One more mysterious case where the system kills EasyEffects without saying the reason why it is doing that.
I am not sure. Firefox crashing should make EasyEffects crash. |
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I am having crashes with the flatpak version 7.2.3 A simple way to reproduce this is to install the flatpak version, add a heavy resource using effect to the microphone (haven't checked with speaker) i.e. deep noise remover. Then open obs or something that uses the microphone (easy effects source). Then somehow put the system under heavy CPU load. You can just maximize and unmaximize a browser window. Make sure CPU gets under high usage. And then easyeffects should crash in a couple of seconds. Here is the command output for And relevant |
Under these circumstances it may make sense for the system to kill EasyEffects. By default the filters run in a realtime thread managed by PipeWire. If a heavy plugin runs on it when the system is under heavy load it may happen that the plugin takes too long to do what it has to do and the system decides to kill EasyEffects. It will depend on the CPU. And on how heavy is the load on it. What is strange is the system killing EasyEffects when there is no heavy plugin in the pipeline and the CPU has almost no load. These cases are still a mystery. |
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Well, I do occasionally have strangely 27% CPU use when easyeffects is idle, which is really strange. (27% CPU meaning what |
It should not be killed when the CPU load is only of 27%. When I think about heavy load I have in mind the cases where each core load is of at least 80% or 90 %. By default top shows values in a scale that goes from zero to |
But it's illegal to have 24 cores. Honestly, I think there's just some sort of a bug somewhere. |
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I agree. There is a non negligible number of users having EasyEffects killed by the system. What is frustrating is that as I have never seen EasyEffects being killed on my computer I do not know even how I could try to debug this. Specially considering that the system does not say why it is killing EasyEffects. When the |
Try running Firefox in a
I have to add, I only have seen easyeffects killed once when I was listening to sound. Most of the times, it's killed when no active sound processing is/should be done (but there seems to be non-idle CPU usage!). Maybe one way to investigate is to see how easyeffects can have CPU usage when it's completely idle (no sound is played). For example, when I open xAI's Grok in Firefox, it shows as input in easyeffects and then STAYS there even if there's no sound is played or even if I just browse x.com in that tab. That's weird, right? Could be related. |
I did some quick tests and nothing unusual happened. Using it for long times will be annoying when even simple things like saving files are broken because of the apparpor sandbox. And considering what firejails aims to do testing with it may not make sense. Things may be broken just because apparmor is not allowing something that has to be allowed. |
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Maybe it's easyeffects itself. Now I have Clocks output stream stuck in Output tab of easyeffects, even though no alarms are going off or scheduled and the Clocks app (GNOME) is closed. That's not normal. I'm also getting lsp-catalog-* files in /dev/shm/ lately all the time. |
When this happens are these streams also visible in pavucontrol? I can think of a few possibilities for this behavior:
In any case none of this should have EasyEffects being killed as a result. You may be facing more than one issue at the same time. |
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I did face this issue (Fedora 41) with the default Fedora kernel, dbus just keeps killing easyeffects after every Spotify music track change. I'm now using a different kernel and the issue never occurred again and I stopped thinking about it. |
What's your kernel version now? |
I switched to https://github.com/CachyOS/copr-linux-cachyos |
I wonder why. The kernel version by itself should not be the problem. Otherwise I would also have seen this on Arch Linux. Maybe Fedora is doing something when configuring its kernel that makes EasyEffects to be killed. |
Back then I thought the Crystalizer effect was the root cause of audio stutters and SIGKILLs, but the issue persisted no matter how I configured my effects. So, based on my case, I don't think these kind of issues are caused by easyeffects. Most Fedora users won't even think of switching to a different kernel. |
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I noticed this persistent weird stuff from the tab where I open xAI's Grok in Firefox. It starts outputting sound (as evidenced by an output source added to Easyeffects), but there's nothing play in that tab, it's just Grok, you know? There's no sound there. And then it starts ramping up CPU cycles on Easyeffects, even though nothing is playing. I close the tab, easyeffects CPu usage goes back to idle, close to zero or whatever. Very suspicious. And I think I noticed these kills started happening around when I started using Grok, as I think I already mentioned, but not in a way that I can attribute it to that (as mentioned earlier, no reason for the kills by the kernel). |
Hum... When you have time run |
I booted back to Fedora's kernel |
That is a lot of |
Ha, I'm on 6.12.13. No crackling much, but lots of kills. I'll update soon, I guess, before anything. |
Quantum for Firefox is 900, alsa output quantum is 512. Is that good? |
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I suspect the Crystalizer effect has some kind of part in my case, since this issue happens more frequently if I have it enabled, I don't know about other cases though. |
It depends on the sampling rate. But for the usual values of 48 kHz and 44.1 kHz it should not be a problem. Depending on the system it may cause crackling. But it should not use as much CPU as a quantum of 128 or 64. Something you may try is temporarily forcing a fixed and higher quantum like 1024 or 2048 https://gitlab.freedesktop.org/pipewire/pipewire/-/wikis/Guide-Latency and see if that changes anything.
This is one of our heaviest plugins and does several calls to the zita-convolver library. That in turns uses |
Always power of 2 values. They are more efficient. And if I am not mistaken the range goes from 32 up to 8192. |
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Ok, I removed Crystallizer effect from the rack, I don't wanna jinx it, but it seems to not crash anymore. We'll see in a few days for sure, of course. Grok, though, keeps easyeffects not idle, with some CPU usage, nothing crazy, but what the hell is going on??? |
My guess is that it is the same or similar to the streams that Pavucontrol creates to measure volume levels. Is it recording audio from a device or playing to it? |
No, it's Grok, it's not doing anything, it's just text, no audio input/output (supposedly). So it's possible it's measuring volume levels? That's bizarre. |
Hum... I am not familiar with it. Is it one of those AI chat bots for Firefox? If yes one possibility is that it creates a stream for "text to speech". That kind of functionality for people that can not type in a keyboard. For example blind people. Usually Firefox tries to use the package |
It's not a bot, it's x.com/i/grok webpage. I thought no website can use speech-dispatcher unless requested by user. I don't have speech-dispatcher installed. |
If I remember well speech-dispatcher creates its own stream independent from the browser and its name is in the stream name. If it were it you would recognize it immediately. |
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Although I do not have a X account I've decided to type What is curious is that on both browsers no stream is created if I just type |
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Ok, I am still getting easyeffects killed without Crystallizer on. I blame Grok tab doing something weird. |
EasyEffects Version
7.1.9
What package are you using?
Fedora
Distribution
Fedora 41
Describe the bug
If I leave Easyeffects on for a little while, it is automatically killed. I even leave the window open, both the window and process get killed.
Expected Behavior
I didn't see this behavior last year, it appeared relatively recently. Before, easyeffects would stay on at all times. That's what I would expect.
Debug Log
No response
Additional Information
No response
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