[pulseaudio-discuss] Pulseaudio over WLAN stuttering

[Thomas Martitz]

Hello folks,

I am recently trying to use PA over the network and am encountering a 
major problem: The sound is stuttering a lot and is full if tiny lags 
(it sometimes appears as if the song is played back with a lower speed).

After a bit of investigation ([1], [2]) it seems to be related to my 
WLAN. It's a private b/g-type WLAN so bandwidth should be sufficient. 
And indeed connecting the server (a laptop running debian wheezy) via 
wire improves the situation a bit. But it's still not acceptable. I 
cannot connect the client via wire as it's a tablet PC (HP Touchpad with 
debian wheezy chroot).

Do you have any hints why PA performs so bad on WLAN? And is there 
anything I can do about it? I did make sure it's not a "out of CPU power 
problem" on the client or server. I also tried realtime scheduling 
(although this is not a -rt linux kernel). Perhaps I can adjust some 
buffer sizes? I'm perfectly willing to give up latency if it makes the 
stuttering go away.

Thank you a lot in advance!

Best regards.

[1]: https://bugs.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+source/pulseaudio/+bug/273742
[2]: http://pulseaudio.org/ticket/366 <http://pulseaudio.org/ticket/366>