Skype is a CPU hog on Fedora 11

[Robert Wuest]

On 06/22/2009 05:25 PM, Brian Mury wrote:
> On Mon, Jun 22, 2009 at 15:03, Robert Wuest<rwuestfc at wuest.org>  wrote:
>    
>> Skype was working fine on Fedora 10, but on 11 it consumes 100% of a CPU
>>      
>
> Is the CPU at 100% all of the time, or only when Skype is in use?
> Is Skype configured to use PulseAudio?
>
> If I set Skype to use PulseAudio for the ringing device, it uses 100%
> CPU when it plays sounds, and for several seconds afterwards. This
> doesn't always happen the first few times it plays sounds, but will
> start happening after it has been in use for a while (it doesn't take
> long). Setting it to the ALSA device works.
>
> Strangely enough, I had this problem on a previous Fedora version (9?
> 10? I forget), but it eventually went away - after some software
> updates, if I recall correctly, but my memory is pretty hazy on this.
> Seems it's back in F11... :-(
>
> BTW, I haven't tried using PulseAudio for the sound in/sound out
> devices, so I don't know how that would behave. I have a USB headset
> that is used only for Skype.
>
> Brian
>
>    
I am using pulse. To be honest, audio has become a freakin' mystery to 
me on Linux -  I feel lucky if anything plays at all anymore.
(I've been trying to decipher this in hopes of getting a clue to my 
audio problems : 
http://insanecoding.blogspot.com/2009/06/state-of-sound-in-linux-not-so-sorry.html)

I had a real hard time getting the microphone input to work.  So I have 
the input set to pulse and the output set to HDA Intel.  That is the 
only thing I could ever get to work at all.  I tried every combination, 
calling that skype testing service thing each time to see if it was 
working.  A _lot_ of time doing trial and error.  I do not see an ALSA 
option.  Only the default (no workie), several HDA Intel options (no 
workie), HDMI (no workie), and Pulse (works).  I think I even installed 
the static version of skype to get it work, then the regular version has 
worked since.  This is a real mess.

So, this might be interesting: what would happen if I just rpm -e'd 
everything pulse?   Can I just remove pulse completely and expect 
anything to work?  All I really care about working would be three 
things: mplayer (for mp3s and oggs and an occasional mpg/avi), flash 
(for hulu.com) and skype.  If everything else was broken, it might be a 
long time before I even noticed.