Occaional media playback stutter

[MartinHemma]

Sometime earlier this year I started to notice that my laptop running SpiralLinux stutters when watching youtube videos. First I thought Google was messing with me because I usually use Invidious. Hence, I didn't investigate and it only happens occasionally. Now, I have realized that this is not limited to online media playback. When this computer has a stutter episode it affects all media playback including music and video living on its SSD.

Computer vital statistics: Bog standard Lenovo X230 with newish battery and one year old SSD. Intel i5-3320M
OS: Debian 12, kernel 6.10.11+bpo-amd64

Observations: Stutter episodes are occasional, maybe once a day on average. Outside of these episodes everything runs smoothly. I have had this computer for several years and had no problems of this sort until earlier this year. Using btop I notice kworker is busy during stutter episodes. I do not know if the kworker activity is causing the stuttering or is just another thing triggered by whatever is causing the stuttering. I have noticed occasional higher than normal but less high kworker activity when there is no stuttering. CPU load is moderate (~10%) and there is room left in RAM during stutter episodes. Hence, I don't think HW limitations cause this.

Internet search: I see reports of Linux media playback stuttering being reported as far back as 10+ years ago but what I have found so far has not been very helpful.

Any ideas?

TIA

/Martin