The audio panel ran a sink lookup, a shell script plus several pactl calls, every 15 seconds on every monitor, whether or not the panel was open. The timer covered a speaker tuning or EasyEffects being applied or removed under the selected output. Those changes show up in Pipewire's graph, so the merged panel resolves the sink when the default sink changes and when nodes or link groups come and go.

A short debounce means a burst of changes resolves once. A hardware output is its own volume sink, so that common case does not spawn the script. David Heinemeier Hansson wrote that on a running desktop with a hardware default sink, the script ran once at startup and not at all over the next 20 seconds. Before, it ran every 15 seconds per monitor. He opened and merged the change.