On Sat, Apr 9, 2011 at 8:21 AM, Matthew Monaco <dgbaley27@verizon.net> wrote:
On 04/08/2011 02:11 AM, Tom Gundersen wrote:
On Fri, Apr 8, 2011 at 10:38 AM, Matthew Monaco<dgbaley27@verizon.net> wrote:
I like having volume control for HDMI out. And I like that this mysterious starving audio, playing silence, glitch has disappeared. But I don't like that pulse uses so much CPU and i think it's a major reason why my computer is runn 5-8 degrees C hotter with gnome3
FWIW, this is almost certainly a bug that can be fixed. In my experience PA allows huge power savings compared to ALSA (down from more than 100 wakeups/sec to less than 10 wakeups/sec).
Try debugging a bit to see what is going on powertop2 should be very helpful.
Cheers,
Tom
I don't see how your CPU can be _less_ active with PA. I thought PA added a layer that didn't exist before and didn't actually remove anything.
I'll say though, that changing VLC from 'default' or explicitly ALSA to PulseAudio dropped CPU usage of PA from ~16% to 3%. (It's mysterious to me why that 3% remains when the media is paused though).
I guess I need to go through gstreamer and other app-specific settings and explicitly point to PA.
PA buffers better than ALSA, or is supposed to, in any case. Of course, if you're using its ALSA-emulation that's a moot point. AFAICR (haven't had this problem for ages), CPU usage from PA is basically caused by the resampling, which you can just modify to a simpler method if you don't need the higher quality of the default (speex, I believe). So yes, PA would save CPU cycles and battery (its meant for use on cellphones as well, after all, the nokia people were involved at some point).