Pulseaudio 40% of CPU

[Marko Vojinovic]

On Monday, October 25, 2010 04:39:53 JD wrote:
>   On 10/24/2010 08:28 PM, JD wrote:
> >  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?
> 
> I would like to add that this behavior is only evident when playing
> a flash video via the browser.
> But if I play a video via ffplayer, then after the end of the video,
> pulseaudio goes back to consuming almost 0% of cpu.
> So, is it possible that the flash plugin is not closing the audio
> file descriptor, so pulseaudio keeps polling and finding nothing?

Probably. Either way, the fact that there is a problem only after flash 
playback indicates that flash and/or the browser are at fault here, not 
pulseaudio.

Best, :-)
Marko