[pulseaudio-discuss] "Expected" or "reasonable" latency

[Eric Jonas]

I'm developing an application which takes data off the network from a
hardware device and plays it out the speaker. This is a continual stream
of 32 ksps data from a dedicated ADC. I'm trying to keep the latency to
the sound subsystem down below 80ms or so. 

Is this a reasonable latency to achieve under a 9.10 Ubuntu machine,
using relatively uninteresting intel audio hardware? 

In experiments (following
http://www.pulseaudio.org/wiki/LatencyControl ) I can get measured
latencies down to around 40 ms at first, but then i get a few drop-outs
and the latencies bump to 60, then 80, then... eventually getting up to
200+ ms. I'm curious if this is designed behavior (is pulse trying to
adaptively change the latency / buffer size to prevent dropouts?) or if
I'm doing something wrong here. 

Thanks, 
    ...Eric