Pulseaudio CPU nightmare
Par MrTom le Dimanche, février 15 2009, 11:21 - Fedora (en) - Lien permanent
I have never hated a software so much… I mean it. Since Pulseaudio had the bad idea to came out, listening to music has never been so horrible. It has been like this since Fedora 9, with no improvements over Fedora 10 and Fedora 11 that I just installed this morning.
Look at this:
Do I really need to buy a Intel Nehalem Corei7 to listen to a poor .ogg file? Really? I know, I only have a Sempron 3100+, but, damn!! Before Pulseaudio, everything was working so well!
Commentaires
Until PA became default and such releases like 09.10 came out, PA was eating less resources.
Many people had problems getting it to work, but when they’ve finally done it, they had no crackling or hiccups, they get with new releases right now (like me).
You can’t listen to an OGG, I can’t play ANY two (or more) audio streams simultaneously.
Oh, and ESD wasn’t so light as you might think right now. Systems with tight-resources like 128MB of RAM felt better with PA than ESD, believe my word.
I’m sorry, but PA was re-written between Fedora 9 and 10. I was expecting less CPU eating for Fedora 10, but the contrary happened. It was worse.
I don’t want to spend time to get this work, I want it to work well by default.
Finally, I would like to believe you, however it’s quite hard to imagine PA is kind of good piece of software when it eats so much CPU and prevents me from doing anything heavy on my computer.
I had the same issue on my old laptops (celeron 1.4) - the cpu was over 25% when I listen to music and lots of dragging from rhythmbox and sometimes totem. It is completely impossible to listen to more than one sound streams the lag is so big it crashes the pulseaudio after only few minutes.
then yum remove pulseaudio and voilà - using alsa only fixed my problems. It is true, I don’t have software mix of my sound and system sounds do not work but who uses them anyway?
the only trouble is how to play sound over the network. For this we had to make some major regressions - install a sound server (old slackware with esd support) and install xmms-esd on all laptops. The mplayer and other media tools are not compiled with esd on fedora 10 so we had to use X11 forwarding and start the media applications remotely, the mplayer on slackware has the esd output (this works for smaller video files but try to watch 720p over 100Mbits network….)
By the way I have tried every possible configuration of pulseaudio (by editing the config file) and still it never managed to play two streams on the celeron laptops. On Core 2 duo 1.6Ghz it plays okay, at the expense of 10% CPU with the default settings.
And by the way the comment above - he is right, esd was not much better, I didn’t used it either when it was the default I only used it like now - for networked sound when needed and it run only on the sound server (the box that has nice surround attached to it).
See http://users.tuxed.net/fkooman/temp…
Three programs running outputting audio (rhythmbox -> vorbis radio station, totem and vlc both playing the same radio MP3 station)
Laptop, Intel T8100 (2.10GHz), 4GB.
00:1b.0 Audio device: Intel Corporation 82801H (ICH8 Family) HD Audio Controller (rev 03)
Just remove pulseaudio - this semi-working toy is completely useless. Let Lennart plays with it alone (nothing personal)
I’m wondering whether it might be related to this:
https://bugzilla.redhat.com/show_bu…
There are actually two causes mentioned there:
1.) A Flash bug (which is probably not your problem)
2.) A more CPU-consuming resampler. Try switching to the “trivial” one
A few weeks ago, I gave up and yum remove’d pulseaudio. There aren’t dependencies outside PA, so it’s not a problem (you have to keep pulseaudio-libs though, but the daemon will be gone).
You should try that, especially if you have no need for it (single sound card with hardware mixer, no USB headset).
I 100% agree. I’ve had so many issues with pulseaudio that now, any install of fedora I do, the next thing I do is remove pulseaudio.
Working perfectly fine here.
And maybe it would for you too if you had filed bug reports instead of waiting for it to magically improve.
It was like that in Fedora 9 already ? And you waited until now ?
Maybe I’m just lucky, but I never had any problem with PA.
And removing it won’t solve your problems. If you don’t solve them now, they will come back much worse when PA will have it been made mandatory as it was working for everyone. Well, everyone except those who didn’t care enough to help making it work.
What is incredible is that it seems people who are complaining most are those who (like me I admit) have absolutely no idea how the audio stack works and how it can be improved.
If you want it to « just work » , then help the people working on it to fix your issues. If you want to « just wait », then you lost the right to complain.
<blockquote>PA was re-written between Fedora 9 and 10</blockquote>
Look there for problems. After some rewrites PA got problem for me too, but before it was a diamond. Just needed some polish.
bochecha, they’ll tell to remove all closed software.
I’d have to remove
and maybe some other things.
Nice, isn’t it?
Lennart says that NVIDIA is source of problems, but before PulseAudio 0.9.10 NVIDIA wasn’t magically source of problems. Someone must be guilty.
sudo rpm -e alsa-plugins-pulseaudio
Then make everything use ALSA for sound output
System
> Preferences> Hardware —> Sound in GNOME for gnome stuff.ao=alsa in .mplayer/config for mplayer
You just have to add your user in the pulse and pulse-rt groups. Problem solved.
Using pulseaudio is mandatory nowadays.
It is not manditory. Anymore then running gnome or KDE is manditory.
If your having performance issues with P-A adding yourself to pulse-rt and enabling realtime permissions does help. This eliminates most of the problems you will get with delay or crackling.
On older CPUs were that doesn’t work you (when playing a video you will need all the cpu you can muster) will simply have to adjust the daemon settings to use a lower quality resampling method.
I think, but don’t know, that dmix’s default sampling is equivelent to the ‘trivial’ setting in PA. By default PA’s sampling is speex-float-3, which is much higher quality method.
If you can not tell the difference (I can’t on my laptop speakers and cheap headphones) then choose the faster settings and get back to similar performance you had when you were running just with dmix.
These settings are in /etc/pulse/daemon.conf and are documented with man files and online.
Same issue here. Pulseaudio is consuming 5-10% CPU on a Dothan core solo 1,6GHz.
I compared the consume on several players and the results are quite strange. The highest consume is using Audacious, while the lowest is with Totem :-S