[pulseaudio-discuss] PulseAudio Painfully Slow

[Alexander E. Patrakov]

14.07.2014 00:04, Benny de von Ausfern wrote:
> So yes, I tried to install pulseaudio again, for the 99th time. No, it 
> did not work "out-of-the-box", pulseaudio does not work out of the box 
> for any of my devices, not for the past 4 years. No, its not simpler 
> than ALSA, I have to crawl everywhere to tell it to stop being 
> intrusive (who said that I want it to reset my mixer volumes every 
> single time I plug in/out my headphones!??!).

(ignored, as this is not the main point)

>
> So before ranting all against pulseaudio again, I decided to come here 
> and let you guys perhaps point out if I've done anything wrong. 
> Performance is the name of the game here.
>
> I cannot, for instance, play games and listen to music at the same 
> time. Pulseaudio eats so much resource trying to resample everything 
> that even if I set the graphics resolution of a 2008 game to its 
> minimum, run it windowed in 720 (rather than my 1080) the game is 
> still only marginally playable. Add skype voicechat together with that 
> and the game is simply unplayable. I've tested with 5 different games 
> (FEZ, Trine 2, Left 4 Dead 2, Brutal Legend, Dungeons & Dragons Online 
> - on Wine), they are all unplayable (some run ok if its only music + 
> game, but none with skype + game or skype + game + music). I've tried 
> different resample methods, but even "resample-method = trivial", the 
> FPS drop is so considerable that its hard/unpleasant/impossible to 
> play these games regardless of what I do (except for FEZ, that one 
> works. Guess why....)

We need to separate wine and PulseAudio bugs here. It's quite unusual 
that you blame PulseAudio even though wine contains a much slower 
resampler that is always on. Please see this bug that I still refuse to 
work on because my earlier work was ignored:

http://bugs.winehq.org/show_bug.cgi?id=30639

Can you reproduce the bug without wine?

Also, some details about your systems would be nice. All we need is the 
contents of /proc/cpuinfo, the "top" output while making an audio call 
with skype (with no games), and the information collected by 
alsa-info.sh script:

http://www.alsa-project.org/alsa-info.sh

-- 
Alexander E. Patrakov