[pulseaudio-discuss] Using PulseAudio for patchbay between a lot of clients

[Arun Raghavan]

Hi Marcin,

On Mon, 27 Jun 2016, at 07:15 PM, marcin at saepia.net wrote:
> Hello,
> 
> I am developing an app for which I need to route sound between many
> different processes. Basically I need to do similar things as with JACK.
> Clients just play a song or capture it and save or/and send over internet
> (these clients are based on GStreamer). The system can have +/- 500
> PulseAudio clients at one machine. Latency is not critical but should be
> kept below +/- 40ms. In the future we would also like to route sound
> between PulseAudio instances.
> 
> We use JACK at the moment but it is not reliable. JACK1 is not
> asynchronous
> and will cause drops on some causes, JACK2 is full of hardcoded
> limitations
> and assumptions and tends to hang above 100 clients. Logging is scarce
> and
> its overall architecture seems to be not valid for such use case and it
> does not allow us to use more sophisticated modules that PulseAudio
> provides.
> 
> So we would like to migrate to the most recent PulseAudio and use
> module-loopback and/or module-combine-sink to perform routing between
> apps.
> 
> Any suggestions on how PulseAudio should be configure to handle such load
> (assuming that underlying hardware has enough resources). What issues I
> may
> encounter?

Did you have any luck with this? The first gotcha is just the hard-coded
limits in the code (mostly to prevent a denial of service if too many
clients connect in the desktop case). I'd be curious to know how this
fared.

Regards,
Arun