[pulseaudio-discuss] Make discoverable PA network sound devices available locally results in huge network traffic

[Maarten Bosmans]

2011/1/20 Brian J. Murrell <brian at interlinx.bc.ca>:
> I have a laptop (Ubuntu 10.10) who's sound I would like to go to my workstation
> (also Ubuntu 10.10) so on the laptop in paprefs I have selected "Make
> discoverable PulseAudio network sound devices available locally" enabled.

This alone should not result in a significant amount of packets, only
a couple of mDNS requests.

> The moment I select that, watching a packet dump (i.e. tcpdump) reveals a huge
> amount of traffic between the machines.  By huge I mean a constant spew of
> hundreds of packets per second.

I assume you also loaded module-zeroconf-publish on the other machine.
Looking at the traffic with wireshark reveals a bit of mDNS chat
between the machines and a short burst of packets every 10 seconds. By
no means a constant spew. The burst of packets every 10 seconds is
probably due to module-tunnel requesting the latency of each sink.
It's not a lot of traffic though.

> This happens regardless of whether there is sound being played or not.

Hmm, this really sound more like you have activated rtp-send.

> Is this really normal and expected?

Well, other than what I described above, I can't reproduce it here, so
it would probably not be expected. Could you look with wireshark to
see a bit more clear what the packets are?

BTW, a wireshark protocol analyzer for the native pulse tcp protocol
would be awesome.

> Cheers,
> b.

Maarten