Audio dropouts with live audio/video streams RPI 4

My 8 year old son and myself are great fans of our osmc-media center.
RPI 4 with 1GB memory
OSMC August 2024, Kernel 5.15.92-1-osmc
hifiberry DAC+ ADC pro
simple 2.0 Audio-Output with external amplifier and two speakers
CPU-Temperature very stable between 50°C and 53°C
Very good Internet connection with stable 50Mbits/sec.

The last few years everything worked perfect … till an update a few weeks ago (current version mentioned above)
Now we are facing dramatic audio problems:
While continuous streaming, after about one hour (+/- a few minutes) audio begins to drop out for short periods. Up from this point it get worse from minute to minute. long dropouts are following very short ones and vice versa. During long dropouts (10-20sec) at the upper right corner of the screen the message “Zwischenspeichern” (“buffering”) apears.
It seems to be completely independent whether we play a live stream or a video stream (both from the internet). The only mitigation is to stop the stream and start it again.

Logging in with ssh and checking the free memory with the linux-command “free” shows, that free memory gets reduced by around 2 MB per minute. At the point, where the audio dropouts occur, the memory is already reduced by about 60 to 90 MB(!). After stopping the Stream, the “lost” memory is available again.

see Upload: https://paste.osmc.tv/uduzicirih

Explanations for the File from Nov 2nd 2024:

at about 13:55 Stream was started
at about 13:58 free -h reported 580Mi free
at about 10:00 free -h reported 577Mi free
at about 14:15 free -h reported 554Mi free
at about 14:30 free -h reported 533Mi free
at about 14:44 first audio dropouts occur! at that time free -h reported 515Mi free
after stopping the stream, free -h reported again 586Mi free memory

Any idea?
Thanks in advance for your efforts!
Best Regards
Gerhard

Try disabling Sync Playback to display.

Thank you for your hint!
Good News!
a test-run (audio stream) during last night was successful!
For this evening I plan the second test with a video stream.
Best Regards!

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Good catch.

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