[pulseaudio-discuss] PulseAudio Painfully Slow

[Benny de von Ausfern]

All the mentioned games run natively, with the exception being Dungeons &
Dragons Online (which runs fine with ALSA). This is certainly not a Wine
bug. I want you to understand that "killall -9 pulseaudio" immediately
solves all the problems, so its nothing but natural to blame pulseaudio.

This is my /proc/cpuinfo: http://pastebin.com/CqccL3qm
alsa-inf.sh: http://pastebin.com/8zC6fdhh


Pulseaudio is around 6% usage. When there is a game running, sometimes the
thing propagates to the WM (Enlightenment DR 18 with all the compositions
disabled, I don't like them) itself - windows lag when I try to
move/resize, take longer to open or freeze for a couple of seconds without
reason. Once again: killing pulseaudio solves it IMMEDIATELY. I've never
had this behaviour without pulseaudio. As a matter of fact, I can play 2 or
3 of those games simultaneously (I have 2 screens) with ALSA without any
noticeable slowdown.

top with Audacious playing music: http://pastebin.com/8eBbus7k
top with Skype (and nothing else going on): http://pastebin.com/DyJ0vJWC

My pulseaudio configurations are the very default ones, except that these
are disabled in default.pa
   #load-module module-device-restore
   #load-module module-stream-restore
   #load-module module-card-restore
   #load-module module-switch-on-port-available
and this:
   resample-method = trivial



On 13 July 2014 11:40, Alexander E. Patrakov <patrakov at gmail.com> wrote:

> 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
> _______________________________________________
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> pulseaudio-discuss at lists.freedesktop.org
> http://lists.freedesktop.org/mailman/listinfo/pulseaudio-discuss
>
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