christopher's notes

pipewire running with wrong priority

Since switching to pipewire, I have been experiencing occasional audio stutters that sound like buffer underruns. Audio isn't unusable, but it was a bit worse than I expected.

Today I stumbled across this note in the arch wiki, noting a bug that causes the pipewire process to lose priority after a suspend. I don't have a realtime setup (rtprio rlimit is 0 given by ulimit -r), but this still seemed kinda relevant.

I quickly checked and indeed found that my pipewire process was running with normal nice level (nice value 0, same as all other process). But in /usr/share/pipewire/pipewire.conf, the nice.level should have been set to -11. And I think this may still be affected by the bug. Another point of confirmation - I see "The canary thread is apparently starving." in my system journal after resuming from suspend.

Made the fix suggested on arch wiki and restarted pipewire to see that the nice value was now -11 as expected. Time will tell if this actually seems better. If it's still struggling, I might try actually installing the realtime package group and setting that up properly.


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