[pulseaudio-discuss] Constant 6 % CPU usage when playing Ogg radio stream

[Paul Menzel]

Dear PulseAudio folks,


using Debian Sid/unstable with PulseAudio 2.0-6 and playing an
Ogg-Vorbis stream [1] with Radio Tray 0.7.2-1 [2], `htop` shows that PA
constantly uses five to six percent of the CPU (AMD Athlon 4850e). Using
OProfile I see the following.

        $ opcontrol --version
        opcontrol: oprofile 0.9.6 compiled on Jul 11 2011 15:32:06
        $ sudo opcontrol --separate=lib,kernel
        $ sudo opcontrol --start
        $ opreport
        […]
           100885 12.5352 pulseaudio
        	CPU_CLK_UNHALT...|
        	  samples|      %|
        	------------------
        	    43817 43.4326 no-vmlinux
        	    16451 16.3067 libpulsecommon-2.0.so
        	    12801 12.6887 libspeexdsp.so.1.5.0
        	    11348 11.2485 libpulsecore-2.0.so
        	     3897  3.8628 libpulse.so.0.14.2
        	     3080  3.0530 libc-2.13.so
        	     2844  2.8191 libasound.so.2.0.0
        	     2000  1.9825 libpthread-2.13.so
        	     1622  1.6078 libprotocol-native.so
        	     1563  1.5493 libalsa-util.so
        	      602  0.5967 ld-2.13.so
        	      542  0.5372 [vdso] (tgid:13180 range:0xb77a6000-0xb77a7000)
        	      318  0.3152 librt-2.13.so
        […]

I have no clue, but looking into this it looks like Radio Tray probably
uses some ALSA interface instead of PulseAudio directly? (This is just a
guess though.)

Testing MPlayer

        $ mplayer -ao pulse -playlist http://www.dradio.de/streaming/dkultur_hq_ogg.m3u

and looking at `htop` the CPU usages drops to three to four percent.


Thanks,

Paul


        $ aptitude show radiotray
        Package: radiotray                       
        New: yes
        State: installed
        Automatically installed: no
        Version: 0.7.2-1
        Priority: optional
        Section: sound
        Maintainer: Elías Alejandro Año Mendoza <ealmdz at gmail.com>
        Architecture: i386
        Uncompressed Size: 816 k
        Depends: python2.7 | python2.6, python (>= 2.6.6-7~), python (< 2.8), python-gtk2 (>= 2.16.0), python-xdg, python-gobject (>= 2.18.0),
                 python-notify (>= 0.1.1), python-gst0.10 (>= 0.10), python-glade2, python-lxml (>= 2.1.5), python-dbus (>= 0.83.0),
                 gstreamer0.10-plugins-base (>= 0.10), gstreamer0.10-plugins-good, gstreamer0.10-plugins-ugly
        Description: online radio streaming player
         This is a simple music streaming player that lives on the system tray. By clicking on the RadioTray icon, you'll be presented with a list
         of pre-configured online radios. By selecting one of those radios, it will start playing.
        Homepage: http://radiotray.sourceforge.net


[1] http://www.dradio.de/wir/ogg/
[2] http://radiotray.sourceforge.net/
http://www.dradio.de/streaming/dkultur_hq_ogg.m3u 
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