[pulseaudio-discuss] pulseaudio 0.9.14 - very high CPU usage when network sinks are enabled

[Mark Greenwood]

On Sunday 15 February 2009 20:17:15 Mark Greenwood wrote:
> Hi,
> 
> When using pavucontrol on systems with network sinks enabled, the CPU usage on all the systems is very high indeed.
> 
> I have a network of several machines. Most of them are running pulseaudio 0.9.14. I've enabled network sinks on all of them, and enabled zeroconf and auth.anonymous. Basically I've used paprefs so that every machine can see every other machine.
> 
> When I run pavucontrol 0.9.7 on any of the machines, the pulseaudio process on all of them starts to use huge amounts of CPU - enough to make it quit on slow machines. I've now built pavucontrol 0.9.6 from source and it does not produce this problem. 
> 
> I've noticed that, when 0.9.7 is running, there is a lot of network traffic even when no audio is playing. It makes me wonder whether the cause of this problem is the vu-meters being displayed for all network sinks.
> 

Hmm. On further inspection this looks more like a general problem with network sinks on 0.9.14. It seems that any network traffic where 0.9.14 is involved will give this huge CPU usage problem. Because now I can use pavucontrol 0.9.6 but as soon as I use it to send audio to a network sink I get the very high CPU usage again.

I tried sending audio from a machine running 0.9.14 to a machine running 0.9.10. The CPU usage on the 0.9.10 machine was 98%
I tried sending audio from a machine running 0.9.14 to a machine running 0.9.14. The CPU usage on the receiving machine was 98%
In both the above cases the CPU usage on the sending machine was around 45%
I tried sending audio from a machine running 0.9.10 to the same 0.9.10 machine as before. the CPU usage on the receiving machine was 20%. The CPU usage on the sending machine was 15%

In all cases I'm using the 'Move Stream' option on pavucontrol to send audio to a zeroconf-discovered network sink.

I'd like to help by investigating further but I need pointers.

I did a quick test on a Mandriva system running 0.9.15, and got the same issue there.

Mark

> Mark
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