Pulseaudio 40% of CPU

[JD]

  On 10/19/2010 01:35 AM, Hiisi wrote:
> 2010/10/19 JD<jd1008 at gmail.com>:
>>   I played one video on youtube, then
>> killed the youtube browser tab.
> <--SNIP-->... I have to always
>> kill pulseaudio so I can get some response back.
>>
> Actually not answering your question, but just wanted to confirm this
> problem on my system (2.6.32.21-168.fc12.i686). I often have to do the
> same!
> In my opinion 'flash' is an ugly thing. And, to be honest, I'm the one
> among those whom to blame for its wide usage. I was working nearly for
> 5 years as a part-time teacher at school, teaching schoolboys to use
> flash in web-projects. Now I do not know how to atone for my sins :-)
> Looking forward for html5 video support in FireFox. Hope it became
> video-standard some day...
No matter what we think of flash, pulseaudio is not a product
of the flash plugin. It is a free and opensource linux product.
I just created output of strace of the pulseaudio process
and posted it at
http://pastebin.com/VbgCXwc3
It shows clearly that it is in a tight loop polling and finding
nothing to process. As I had stated earlier, there is no youtube
video playing at all. It seems once you play any browser based
flash video, pulseaudio will continue to run even after you kill the
tab where it was playing, and chew up 40% of cpu (at least, this
is on my laptop with the old athlon64 3700+ unicore cpu).
I do not know how much it consumes on much faster cpu's.

Are there audio engineers on this list?
Is this the way to handle an audio stream by an audio daemon?