[pulseaudio-discuss] [alsa-devel] pulseaudio eats 19% CPU power in Fedora 12

[Lennart Poettering]

On Wed, 14.04.10 15:56, Wu Fengguang (fengguang.wu at intel.com) wrote:

> Hi Lennart,
> 
> We found that pulseaudio eats CPU ~19% CPU time, a little more than
> mplayer when playing video. This is horrible for laptop batteries.

This is not a particularly useful report. 

You know, this can have so many different reasons, the only thing I can
really say, is that you can rest assured that it is not supposed to eat
that much in normal use.

The CPU usage of PA is primarily dependant of the latency requested by
the clients. Low latency means high CPU load. Lower latency means higher
CPU load. Try "pacmd list-sink-inputs" to figure out the latency the
various applications requested.

Then there can be driver problems, where the timing information is not
entirely correct that ALSA passes on to, with the result that we get
dropouts where we shouldn't, with the results that we shorten our sleep
times, with the final effect that the CPU usage goes up.

Of course, if PA is used resampling and suchlike is moved from the
clients into the sound server and hence will be added to its CPU
usage. And PA uses a better resampler by default than ALSA traditionally
did, hence the CPU use will be a bit higher than plain ALSA.

And then of course, the CPU usage depends on the CPU used. Is this some
embedded hardware?

In summary: if you want to know what is going on, you need a suitable
tool, like a profiler and do the dirty work to figure out what is going
on. Just saying "19%" is not helpful to figure out what is going on.

On my machine here it uses 3% CPU while playing.

> Can we make it just work -- in green CPU mode? 

Yes, sure. If you use "pacat" you can play audio with almost zero CPU
usage, because it is one of the few clients that actually asks for
sensible latency (2s), which allows us to minimize the wakeup intervals
to less than a second.

> I can find many users
> complaining about this, and it seems like some fix is available in
> this link:
> https://bugs.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+source/pulseaudio/+bug/207135

Fix? Where?

Lennart

-- 
Lennart Poettering                        Red Hat, Inc.
lennart [at] poettering [dot] net
http://0pointer.net/lennart/           GnuPG 0x1A015CC4