Bug 528018

Summary: Pulseaudio CPU usage is very high during playback
Product: [Fedora] Fedora Reporter: Scott Baker <scott>
Component: pulseaudioAssignee: Lennart Poettering <lpoetter>
Status: CLOSED DUPLICATE QA Contact: Fedora Extras Quality Assurance <extras-qa>
Severity: medium Docs Contact:
Priority: low    
Version: 11CC: lkundrak, lpoetter, wtogami
Target Milestone: ---   
Target Release: ---   
Hardware: i686   
OS: Linux   
Whiteboard:
Fixed In Version: Doc Type: Bug Fix
Doc Text:
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Clone Of: Environment:
Last Closed: 2009-10-14 21:41:13 UTC Type: ---
Regression: --- Mount Type: ---
Documentation: --- CRM:
Verified Versions: Category: ---
oVirt Team: --- RHEL 7.3 requirements from Atomic Host:
Cloudforms Team: --- Target Upstream Version:
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Description Flags
Output of "pacmd ls" none

Description Scott Baker 2009-10-08 15:50:23 UTC 
Description of problem:
During audio playback Pulseaudio CPU usage is around ~20%.

Version-Release number of selected component (if applicable):
pulseaudio-0.9.15-17.fc11.i586
audacious-1.5.1-9.fc11.i586

How reproducible:
Install audacious (or any program that uses pulseaudio) and play an audio stream

Steps to Reproduce:
1. Load audacious
2. Play audio
3. ???
4. Profit
  
Actual results:
Playing a simple MP3 is causing pulseaudio to use ~21% cpu usage, and audacious ~19%.

 2661 bakers    20   0  226m 4924 4100 S 18.9  0.2 448:36.83 pulseaudio
 6330 bakers    20   0  393m 9.8m 6496 S 17.9  0.5 182:37.23 audacious

Pausing the audio drops the CPU a little, but not very much.

 2661 bakers    20   0  226m 4924 4100 S 11.0  0.2 448:40.80 pulseaudio
 6330 bakers    20   0  393m 9.8m 6496 S 10.0  0.5 182:41.50 audacious

That's a lot of CPU cycles to do nothing (it's paused!)

If I stop the audio stream (instead of pausing) the CPU drops way down:

 2661 bakers    20   0  162m 4612 3788 S  4.0  0.2 448:43.82 pulseaudio
 6330 bakers    20   0  329m 9780 6204 S  0.0  0.5 181:41.74 audacious

:lspci | grep audio
03:07.0 Multimedia audio controller: Ensoniq ES1371 [AudioPCI-97] (rev 08)

Expected results:
CPU usage less than 5%!
Comment 1 Lennart Poettering 2009-10-14 21:40:50 UTC 
Please paste output of "pacmd ls". This will show us the latency that Audacious asked from us. Most likely it simply asked for an unnecessarily low latency which drivers PA's CPU usage high.
Comment 2 Lennart Poettering 2009-10-14 21:41:13 UTC 

*** This bug has been marked as a duplicate of bug 514739 ***
Comment 3 Scott Baker 2009-10-15 15:22:25 UTC 
Created attachment 364940 [details]
Output of "pacmd ls"

Here is the requested pacmd ls