[Pkg-audacious-maintainers] Bug#505091: audacious: eats 5% CPU for doing nothing

[John Lindgren]

On Sun, 2009-08-09 at 18:14 +0200, Ralf Neubauer wrote:
> On Thu, Aug 06, 2009 at 08:17:55PM -0400, John Lindgren wrote:
> > Have you tried using ALSA instead of PulseAudio?
> 
> Yes of course, that's how I used audacious before I used packages with
> PulseAudio backend. PulseAudio is not compatible with the ALSA dmix plugin, so
> I had to change over every audio client from ALSA/dmix to PulseAudio. Please
> don't tell me I have to stop using other programs or buy more sound cards.

I'm not suggesting you stop using PulseAudio. I'm just trying to figure
out if this 5% CPU usage is specific to using PulseAudio output plugin
or if you see it with other output plugins as well. When trying to fix a
bug, it helps to narrow down under what conditions it happens.

> PulseAudio is described as CPU and energy saving by the developer, so I'm
> wondering what's happening here. If audacious is just sitting there -- not
> playing audio -- it shouldn't use up any CPU resources.

I've only used PulseAudio once, when I once decided to try Ubuntu, so
all I can say is that the combination of Ubuntu + Rhythmbox + PulseAudio
seemed much slower to me than the combination of Debian + Audacious +
ALSA (without dmix).

John Lindgren