3 ms·

Run all of your apps without pulseaudio and you will see even more CPU useage than. Pulseaudio lowers CPU usage by 5 to 25 percent depending on CPU architectu

• stncls 5y ago
  I just tried, but I could not reproduce this on my laptop here. The overall system load is consistently higher with PulseAudio when playing an audio file with mplayer -- even when using "plughw" (which allows in-kernel software resampling) instead of "hw" (which does not). It must be hardware- or system-dependent. Also, I'm curious why this happens on your system. PulseAudio itself uses ALSA (the standard kernel API for audio) behind the scenes, like any application would, directly, in its absence. In addition, it must carry audio samples across process boundaries and perform software mixing/routing, all with low-ish latency (hence small buffer sizes). All this with negative (up 25%!) CPU usage? One possible explanation: I did read many times that PulseAudio "fixes ALSA bugs" or "fixes buggy applications". However, I can't remember encountering any such bug in the last few years (or any PulseAudio bugs either, to be honest). Nowadays, most applications that can use ALSA directly do so through alsalib, which could just as well iron out such issues if any remain. Which application triggers this behavior?