Stuttering audio in Linux: PulseAudio strikes again

I unmasked PulseAudio 10.0 back in January 2017 and installed it in my Gentoo Stable amd64 installation, and everything worked fine… until a couple of days ago, when the audio in streaming YouTube videos started to stutter every so often. It sounded rather like a scratched LP jumping. At first I thought the problem lay with Firefox, but the stuttering audio also occurred in Chrome. Then I wondered if my Internet connection was to blame; perhaps the ISP’s service had deteriorated. But a Windows 10 machine on my home network didn’t suffer from the problem, so that seemed to rule out the Internet connection. I tested the broadband throughput, and it was circa 32 Mbps, actually a little higher than the last time I tested it last year.

Now, Gentoo is a rolling distribution and I update my laptops regularly, but I couldn’t think what had been upgraded in the last couple of months that could be causing the problem. Although PulseAudio had not been upgraded since January, I began to wonder if PulseAudio could be involved, as my audio woes in the past have usually been due to PulseAudio.

I have always had PulseAudio installed with USE=”-realtime”:

user $ eix -I pulseaudio
[I] media-sound/pulseaudio
     Available versions:  10.0 {+X +alsa +alsa-plugin +asyncns bluetooth +caps dbus doc equalizer +gdbm +glib gnome gtk ipv6 jack libressl libsamplerate lirc native-headset neon ofono-headset +orc oss qt4 realtime selinux sox ssl system-wide systemd tcpd test +udev +webrtc-aec zeroconf ABI_MIPS="n32 n64 o32" ABI_PPC="32 64" ABI_S390="32 64" ABI_X86="32 64 x32"}
     Installed versions:  10.0(16:07:53 19/04/17)(X alsa alsa-plugin asyncns bluetooth caps dbus gdbm glib gnome gtk ipv6 jack orc qt4 ssl tcpd udev webrtc-aec zeroconf -doc -equalizer -libressl -libsamplerate -lirc -native-headset -neon -ofono-headset -oss -realtime -selinux -sox -system-wide -systemd -test ABI_MIPS="-n32 -n64 -o32" ABI_PPC="-32 -64" ABI_S390="-32 -64" ABI_X86="32 64 -x32")
     Homepage:            http://www.pulseaudio.org/
     Description:         A networked sound server with an advanced plugin system

but I wondered if PulseAudio’s real-time scheduling was somehow the cause of the problem, so I edited /etc/pulse/daemon.pa and added ‘realtime-scheduling = no‘ (I assume the default is ‘yes‘, as it was commented as such in the file):

; realtime-scheduling = yes
realtime-scheduling = no

Problem solved. PulseAudio is indeed a demon. 😡