[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>:
> Maarten Bosmans <mkbosmans <at> gmail.com> writes:
>> I assume you also loaded module-zeroconf-publish on the other machine.
>
> No, in fact it appears to be commented out in the /etc/pulse/default.pa of the
> workstation (where I hear the audio from the laptop):
>
> #load-module module-zeroconf-publish

Well, that's the static configuration script loaded at the start of
the daemon. As noted in the comment just above that line, ticking the
box in paprefs can also load this module.

If you are able to stream audio over the network, obviously some
modules facilitating that are loaded somehow. Can you provide the
output of "pactl list" on both machines (clearly indicating which is
which)? Be careful, the list only accepts messages <40kB.
Most helpful would be the output when there is no music playing, but
you are seeing high network utilisation.

>> Hmm, this really sound more like you have activated rtp-send.
>
> I don't think I have.  How can I verify?

with pactl list, look for a loaded rtp module.

>> 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?
>
> Well, of course since there isn't a decode module for the pulse protocol I can't
> really tell what they all are, but in terms of "statistics" a capture of just
> port 4713 between the two machines over a period of 205 seconds resulted in
> 234130 packets which was an avg. pps of 1141, with an avg. packet size of 568
> bytes yielding an avg. bandwidth use of 5Mb/s!

That most certainly looks like raw audio bitrate.

Maarten