[pulseaudio-discuss] Re : Effects of Clock Resolution on Pulseaudio

[Lennart Poettering]

On Tue, 22.07.08 17:13, Nick Thompson (rextanka at comcast.net) wrote:

>>> So i am not sure what part of Pulseaudio is causing high CPU Utilization 
>>> ..
>>
>> Hmm, could you do some profiling then? Just the most basic. I.e. what
>> functions take up most CPU.
>
> I'll add more detail in a bit when we get to 0.9.10, h pa_volume_memchunk 
> seems to be a big hitter on arm systems:

Hmm, that function is not optimized in any way, but if I look on its
sources doesn't appear that slow to me either. For each sample we do
one multiplication, one shifting, we appy saturation and then we
increase/decrease poinetrs with wrap around. That shouldn't be that
bad. Also, this code goes once linearly through all samples, which should
minimize influence of the cache.

OTOH this stuff does not use liboil, because liboil doesn't have a
function for saturated multiplication+shifting like this. There's
certainly room for improvement. Patches always welcome. 

I assume the data processes is S16NE and the CPU is LE?

does you cpu have any simd-like unit? something that could benefit
from vectorization? something that is supported by gcc's vector extension?

It should be pretty easy to add a special implementation of
pa_volume_memchunk that uses gcc's vector extension.

>> $ opreport -l /usr/bin/pulseaudio
>> warning: /bridgedriver could not be found.
>> CPU: CPU with timer interrupt, speed 0 MHz (estimated)
>> Profiling through timer interrupt
>> samples  %        image name               symbol name
>> 3581     46.4763  libpulsecore.so.5.0.0    pa_volume_memchunk
>> 432       5.6067  libc-2.5.so              memcpy

Hmm, can you figure out in which context this is called that often? (i
mean, pa's audio memory management should be mostly zero-copy, so
having such a big hit on memcpy here is surprising to me.

>> 277       3.5951  libm-2.5.so              __adddf3

This is interesting, could you figure out the context?

>> 183       2.3751  libpulsecore.so.5.0.0    .plt
>> 176       2.2842  libc-2.5.so              strcmp
>> 141       1.8300  libm-2.5.so              __muldf3

Lennart

-- 
Lennart Poettering                        Red Hat, Inc.
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