I have investigated the issue and I can confirm the described behavior.

However, on my system many SDL-based programs suffer from the same problem:

- e.g. xrick, another SDL-based game, takes also 2-3s to quit
- a small SDL test binary which just opens and closes SDL's audio component runs for 2-3s

chkr@:~/test$ cat sdltest.c 
#include "SDL.h"
#include "SDL_audio.h"

void my_audio_callback(void *userdata, Uint8 *stream, int len) {};

int main()
{
    SDL_AudioSpec format;
    format.freq = 22050;
    format.format = AUDIO_S16;
    format.channels = 2;
    format.samples = 512;
    format.callback = my_audio_callback;
    format.userdata = NULL;

    if ( SDL_OpenAudio(&format, NULL) < 0 ) {
        fprintf(stderr, "SDL_OpenAudio(): %s\n", SDL_GetError());
        exit(1);
    }

    SDL_CloseAudio();
}
chkr@:~/test$ gcc -o sdltest sdltest.c `pkg-config --cflags --libs sdl`
chkr@:~/test$ time ./sdltest 

real	0m2.044s
user	0m0.006s
sys	0m0.011s

- other SDL users have the same problem: http://forums.libsdl.org/viewtopic.php?t=6947

I'll move the bug to the SDL component.

I don't use pulseaudio. Plain ALSA terminates quickly for me. Can you please confirm this problem exhibits only with pulseaudio back-end? The SDL audio back-end can be selected by setting environment variable SDL_AUDIODRIVER to `alsa' or 'pulse'. Please make sure your ALSA library does not redirects to pulseaudio while testing.

I can confirm issue. It polls in pulseaudio library.

Upstream report with work-around <http://bugzilla.libsdl.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1449>.

However it looks more like a bug in pulseaudio. Unfortunately <http://pulseaudio.org/ticket/866> does not work anymore.

SDL audio finish function is:

static void stream_drain_complete(pa_stream *s, int success, void *userdata) {
}

static void PULSE_WaitDone(_THIS)
{
    pa_operation *o;

    o = SDL_NAME(pa_stream_drain)(stream, stream_drain_complete, NULL);
    if (!o)
        return;

    while (SDL_NAME(pa_operation_get_state)(o) != PA_OPERATION_DONE) {
        if (SDL_NAME(pa_context_get_state)(context) != PA_CONTEXT_READY ||
            SDL_NAME(pa_stream_get_state)(stream) != PA_STREAM_READY ||
            SDL_NAME(pa_mainloop_iterate)(mainloop, 1, NULL) < 0) {
            SDL_NAME(pa_operation_cancel)(o);
            break;
        }
    }
    SDL_NAME(pa_operation_unref)(o);
}

The delay is spent in PA's pa_mainloop_iterate() despite the stream buffer is empty.

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