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I'm running a vanilla, fairly new (a month) installation of Unbuntu 9.10 Karmic Koala on a desktop computer. My sound appears to be working fine, I can listen to music as well as flash audio under firefox and chrome. I'm running VMWare Server with a single Windows XP guest. My sound card is onboard the motherboard.

My /var/log/messages however gets filled with messages like the following :

Mar 10 10:18:01 ew2155e pulseaudio[29063]: ratelimit.c: 2 events suppressed
Mar 10 10:18:23 ew2155e pulseaudio[29063]: ratelimit.c: 1 events suppressed
Mar 10 10:30:08 ew2155e pulseaudio[29063]: ratelimit.c: 2 events suppressed
Mar 10 10:30:49 ew2155e pulseaudio[29063]: ratelimit.c: 2 events suppressed
Mar 10 10:31:18 ew2155e pulseaudio[29063]: ratelimit.c: 3 events suppressed
Mar 10 10:32:27 ew2155e pulseaudio[29063]: ratelimit.c: 1 events suppressed
Mar 10 10:34:11 ew2155e pulseaudio[29063]: ratelimit.c: 3 events suppressed
Mar 10 10:35:14 ew2155e pulseaudio[29063]: ratelimit.c: 1 events suppressed
Mar 10 10:35:24 ew2155e pulseaudio[29063]: ratelimit.c: 3 events suppressed
Mar 10 10:42:02 ew2155e pulseaudio[29063]: ratelimit.c: 2 events suppressed
Mar 10 10:43:12 ew2155e pulseaudio[29063]: ratelimit.c: 3 events suppressed
Mar 10 10:43:27 ew2155e pulseaudio[29063]: ratelimit.c: 3 events suppressed
Mar 10 10:43:44 ew2155e pulseaudio[29063]: ratelimit.c: 2 events suppressed
Mar 10 10:47:41 ew2155e pulseaudio[29063]: ratelimit.c: 1 events suppressed
Mar 10 10:48:18 ew2155e pulseaudio[29063]: ratelimit.c: 2 events suppressed
  1. What's causing these messages?
  2. What underlying message with content is being suppressed? If I could understand what ratelimit.c is suppressing I might be able to troubleshoot the problem.

I've read through some entries on ubuntuforums.org where people are asking about these messages but with no luck.

gene_wood
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  • I've been following these threads on ubuntuforums.org : http://ubuntuforums.org/showthread.php?t=789578 http://ubuntuforums.org/showthread.php?t=1298571 – gene_wood Mar 10 '10 at 20:50
  • Doesn't answer the question, but http://www.mail-archive.com/pulseaudio-discuss@mail.0pointer.de/msg06877.html gives this: This error message means nothing by itself. It's just saying that we wanted to log more but we we suppressed it because we don't want to spam the logs. The limit is no more than 10 messages in 5 seconds. – lazysoundsystem Feb 22 '11 at 19:00
  • For what it's worth it's now a year later and I'm running Ubuntu 10.10 Maverick Meerkat and see the same types of messages though more compacted. My current /var/log/messages shows this : `Apr 19 03:58:51 ew2155e pulseaudio[2398]: ratelimit.c: 79445 events suppressed` – gene_wood Apr 20 '11 at 19:31

2 Answers2

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From https://bugs.edge.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+source/linux/+bug/545065 :

Edit /etc/pulse/daemon.conf and change the line log-level = notice to log-level = error.

Ben Pilbrow
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Yojimbo
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  • Indeed, I know how to suppress them, I'm looking for : 1. What's causing these messages? and 2. What underlying message with content is being suppressed? – gene_wood Jan 03 '11 at 23:28
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grep pulseaudio /var/log/messages | grep -v ratelimit

(it's not suppressing all the messages, just the later ones that are flooding the logs...)

anon
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    All this does is to hide the messages, but they are still there. This doesn't solve any of the (OT) problems the OP has. – Sven Oct 21 '15 at 10:39
  • @Sven The question does ask "What underlying message with content is being suppressed?" and assuming the first occurrence of the underlying message is logged once before the ratelimit messages start, then it is plausible that the suggested command could find it. – kasperd Oct 21 '15 at 12:19