[pulseaudio-discuss] Any way to get PA to wake up less when playing low latency?

[Pierre-Louis Bossart]

Hi Dylan, 
please use plain text in your messages, HTML makes it hard to quote your
text...

Your idea of having fewer wakes makes sense. Just technically I think you
are confusing latency with frame size. if you want to use 10ms frames for
speech processing, you will have a 20ms latency, be that with ALSA or
PulseAudio.
Also I think you've hit an issue with PulseAudio's inner details. The idea
is that there's a server side buffer that has the same length than the ALSA
ring buffer. This makes sense for low-power audio, so that you can wake-up
at the last moment and quickly fill the ring buffer. For low-latency, this
might not be such a good idea, since it entails many useless wakes and the
client does have the data available. This behavior is enforced in
pulsecore/protocol-native.c, it may be possible to patch this code to reduce
the server side buffer to zero (or minreq). 
This might be a good point to bring to Lennart, if he still remembers what
he wrote a couple of years ago. Lennart are you still with us?
-Pierre