DEBUGGING AUDIO ARTIFACTS CAUSED BY... A SERIAL PORT?

Summary from the TLDR Web Dev newsletter

A company that processes millions of video call meetings per month migrated its cluster from Kubernetes to a self-built system. After the migration, customers reported popping noises in captured audio, despite no changes to the application code. The issue was traced back to the cloud-init logging system, which writes to a virtual serial device. The system received too much data from the audio encoding process and became overwhelmed, causing the audio processing to experience CPU starvation and leading to the popping noises.