Comment 106 for bug 190754

Just a follow up on my previous post concerning stuttering with gstreamer and ALSA. Sorry if its a little off topic (not directly related to PulseAudio). I was able to get gstreamer based applications to not drop out anymore by increasing the buffer size. With gconf-editor add the parameter "buffer-time=400000" (for 400ms buffer size) to the audiosink, chataudiosink and musicaudiosink keys in /system/gstreamer/0.10/default. So the key values should look like:
alsasink buffer-time=400000

The default is 200ms though, which seems like more than enough. This suggests that there is something more sinister going on in regards to latency (as others have suggested). I think the nvidia driver is a good candidate, since it seems like it most often occurs when doing min/maximize of windows and not when other non graphics processes are consuming all of CPU (at least in my case).