I was wondering if anyone had done much of a performance characterization on the extra overhead imposed by running pulse audio.   Especially in seemly trivial cases.   I've been evaluating pulse audio and I've found that. On an ARM based system (no Floating Point) I am playing a MP3 through gstreamer(mad) to a pulseaudio sink (s16le  44100) to pulseaudio through the native protocol. In this configuration pulse audio was set up with an alsa output source (s16le 44100).  This is a direct alsa hookup (no dmix) In this configuration the gstreamer process takes up ~30% of my CPU and pulse uses about 20%. My base case is the same setup without pulse audio.   I am playing through gstreamer to an alsasink (s16le 44100) directly to the hardware. In this case the gstreamer process takes ~12% of my cpu. To me this seems like I am doing something wrong, that is quite a bit of overheard for essentially what should be transferring and buffering at a sound server.  I double and triple checked most of my setting.   Are there any performance detractors that I could be missing?   I started to investigate volume and noticed that changing the(pulse)  volume didn't affect CPU utilization.   Is the volume filter always on?   Even in the case where it should be an identity (100% volume).?  I definitely want to improve this, I just need a little guidance on where to look. Keith Preston