Hi, Thanks for the reply. I can confirm terminating firefox brought CPU usage of pulseaudio down to 0% in top. Also, playing an mp3 through amarok, brought CPU usage back to 6%. So it seems any playback brings the CPU usage up by that much! My sound card is Intel ICH6 chipset ALC861. Is resampling required ? Is it possible to play at the card's native sample rate to gain back the CPU cycles, since I almost always have the browser open with Flash in it :/ Regards <div class="gmail_quote">On Nov 16, 2007 9:21 PM, Lennart Poettering <<a href="mailto:mzerqung@0pointer.de">mzerqung@0pointer.de</a>> wrote: <blockquote class="gmail_quote" style="border-left: 1px solid rgb(204, 204, 204); margin: 0pt 0pt 0pt 0.8ex; padding-left: 1ex;"> On Fri, 16.11.07 20:52, Ahmed Kamal (<a href="mailto:email.ahmedkamal@googlemail.com">email.ahmedkamal@googlemail.com</a>) wrote: Hi! <div class="Ih2E3d"> > Hi, I'm enjoying the wonders of pulse audio. However, on my centrino </div>> 2.0Ghzlaptop, when idle, almost always pulse audio is the most CPU <div class="Ih2E3d">> intensive task running, even when I am not playing any audio! It > consumes around 6% of CPU competing with firefox! This seems a bit > too much to me ? Also, any idea why the process name appears in top > as "exe" rather than pulseaudio! Regards </div>The process name issue has been fixed already, but I haven't uploaded a new version of PA into Rawhide yet. Also note that this issue is alrady listed in rhbz as #345761. PA closes all devices when idle for more than 1s. Then, CPU consumption goes to 0%. Now, there is a certain piece of software which happens to be horrendously broken and is called "Macromedia Flash". I would guess that you are using it, aren't you? Now, Flash never closes any playback streams until you terminate your browser. Due to that PA never considers the device idle and thus never closes the audio device and continues to write audio data to it. Due the closed source nature of Flash this issue is only fixable with exceptionally ugly hacks in PA or libflashsupport.so, which I am not willing to do. If PA consumes 6% CPU this is probably because resampling is needed to output audio on your device. Resampling is usually the only CPU intensive code that is run in PA. While traditionally resampling is done in the various media players if you use PA it is done in PA. Hence the CPU load will appear as if it was PA's fault, but we just moved the resampling work from the app to PA, that's all. Please terminate your browser, and pause/stop all media players and check the CPU load then. (Some codepaths in PA are not optimized as much as they could of course, but from the little information you posted I guessed what I wrote above. If you feel that my guess is not correct, then please open a bug in rhbz) Thanks, Lennart -- Lennart Poettering Red Hat, Inc. lennart [at] poettering [dot] net ICQ# 11060553 <a href="http://0pointer.net/lennart/" target="_blank"> http://0pointer.net/lennart/</a> GnuPG 0x1A015CC4 -- fedora-devel-list mailing list <a href="mailto:fedora-devel-list@redhat.com">fedora-devel-list@redhat.com</a> <a href="https://www.redhat.com/mailman/listinfo/fedora-devel-list" target="_blank"> https://www.redhat.com/mailman/listinfo/fedora-devel-list</a> </blockquote></div>