kmix running at 100% cpu

English Applications
1

This has happened three times today. I don’t recall seeing it previously.

On each occasion, it was after listening to something, either on youtube or another flash applet or an audio applet.

I ran top to watch the process. Even after shutting down the browser, it kept running at 100%. The mixer icon in the tray did not respond.

On the first and second occasions, I logged out of KDE and logged back in. The logout took a lot longer than usual, probably because kmix was not responding properly. After the login, things were fine until I again did something that made sounds. Then kmix went back into looping mode.

On the third occurrence, I just used “kill” to solve the problem. The icon in the tray disappeared, but sound seems to still be working.

Has anyone else experienced this? Was there a recent patch that could be affecting it?

2

On Mon, 20 Jun 2011 07:06:02 +0530, nrickert
<nrickert@no-mx.forums.opensuse.org> wrote:

>
> This has happened three times today. I don’t recall seeing it
> previously.
>
> On each occasion, it was after listening to something, either on
> youtube or another flash applet or an audio applet.
>
> I ran top to watch the process. Even after shutting down the browser,
> it kept running at 100%. The mixer icon in the tray did not respond.
>
> On the first and second occasions, I logged out of KDE and logged back
> in. The logout took a lot longer than usual, probably because kmix was
> not responding properly. After the login, things were fine until I
> again did something that made sounds. Then kmix went back into looping
> mode.
>
> On the third occurrence, I just used “kill” to solve the problem. The
> icon in the tray disappeared, but sound seems to still be working.
>
> Has anyone else experienced this? Was there a recent patch that could
> be affecting it?
>

this happened to me a while ago, but i don’t recall if it had anything to
do with flash or any other application apart from kmix. at that time i had
seen others post here or on the mailing list about this as well. what
solved the problem for me, and others, was to delete everything
kmix-related from ~/.kde4/share/apps & ~/.kde4/share/config. after that,
kmix has been behaving ok.

–
phani.

3

Thanks. I have looked at those. Everything in .kde4/share/config that is kmix related has not changed for several months. When I looked at the kmix stuff in .kde4/share/apps I found a 23M file with a recent date. So I deleted that. I’ll find out if that solves the problem when I next logout and login.

4

There is a kde forum thread on this.
Kmix eating up all available CPU time on one core • KDE Community Forums

I wrote this down in my notes (to do when it occurs):

5

On Mon, 20 Jun 2011 11:36:02 +0530, nrickert
<nrickert@no-mx.forums.opensuse.org> wrote:

>
> phanisvara;2355601 Wrote:
>> what solved the problem for me, and others, was to delete everything
>> kmix-related from ~/.kde4/share/apps & ~/.kde4/share/config. after that,
>> kmix has been behaving ok.
>
> Thanks. I have looked at those. Everything in .kde4/share/config that
> is kmix related has not changed for several months. When I looked at
> the kmix stuff in .kde4/share/apps I found a 23M file with a recent
> date. So I deleted that. I’ll find out if that solves the problem when
> I next logout and login.
>

i don’t think you have to log out/in for that to take effect. closing
kmix, deleting that file, and re-starting kmix should do the trick – if
it works at all. otherwise you got a different problem.

–
phani.

6

Okay, thanks. I’m trying that now.

Previously, as it was running, it had a strange process title. That’s what gave me the idea that it was tightly integrated into the KDE startup sequence in a way that simply restarting would not recreate.

And thanks, too, to oldcpu. Yes, it looked as if the process was looping on one core. I’m pretty sure the problem is with the “.kde4/share/apps/kmix/” files, since the files in “.kde4/share/config/kmix/” all have dates that are near the time that I installed this system.

7

Everything seems to be working fine now.

For the record, the file that I deleted appears to be:
$HOME/.kde4/share/apps/kmix/profiles/PulseAudio.Playback_Streams.1.default.xml

It was 23M. Looking on my laptop, I see a 444 byte file there. Presumably, something went wrong to get it up to 23M. That deleted file has not been recreated (at least, not yet).

8

On Mon, 20 Jun 2011 20:06:03 +0530, nrickert
<nrickert@no-mx.forums.opensuse.org> wrote:

>
> Everything seems to be working fine now.
>
> For the record, the file that I deleted appears to be:
> $HOME/.kde4/share/apps/kmix/profiles/PulseAudio.Playback_Streams.1.default.xml
>
> It was 23M. Looking on my laptop, I see a 444 byte file there.
> Presumably, something went wrong to get it up to 23M. That deleted file
> has not been recreated (at least, not yet).
>

congrats, and hoping it will stay that way. 23M for an XML config file
seems very large; i suspect that something went wrong when that file was
created and the system has been adding rubbish to it while it was
(ab)using the CPU…

–
phani.

9

Yes, obviously something went wrong.

Given the location of the file, I’m not so sure that it is a config file. It might be a data file, and perhaps I accidentally did something that began recording an audio stream into that file.

10

i traced same problem to the same file. only i moved it away instead of deleting :slight_smile:

the file is a “sort of” proper xml, with most lines being similar to :

<control id="^stream:.$" subcontrols="*" show=“simple” />

there’s a whole bunch of duplicate lines, and some have a newline in the ‘stream’ value.
then the stream values seem to go up - !$, "$, #$, $$, ,%$, &$ - and so on. then come numbers and alphabet letters. and then, after curly braces and .$, there’s something messy. a LONG strong value, consisting only of 0x0C3 and 0x083 - which i suspect to be the one actually breaking kmix (but i ran out of steam to debug it further). so “something” creates such a broken file, which kmix then breaks upon.

11

The file still has not been recreated here, and everything has been working smoothly.