PulseAudio high CPU usage on NetBSD 7_RC1/amd64

["William D. Jones" <thor0505%comcast.net@localhost>]

Hello all,

Can anyone who is using NetBSD in a desktop setting confirm whether PulseAudio uses 100% of one CPU core while a video is playing either in a web browser (such as Firefox) or a media player?

I'm currently unable to diagnose the issue, but since I installed it, any time I do either of the things listed above, a PulseAudio instance will consume 100% of WCPU/CPU according to top. Starting PulseAudio with log-level=debug does not show anything out of the ordinary, such as (many) buffer over/underruns. Copying the default daemon.conf from pkgsrc into ~/.config/pulse and changing the resampler to trivial does not fix the problem.

PulseAudio already crackles/glitches slightly as is, with the default high-priority/realtime settings, so I would prefer not to mess with that. Even taking realtime/high priority scheduling into account, something just doesn't seem right about the high CPU usage. At the very least, I can play an HTML5 video in Firefox on Linux, using a system with a slightly slower CPU, and pulse's CPU usage barely registers in top (realtime).

Does anyone have suggestions on how to go about trying to fix these issues? I need a sound mixer, and for better or worse, PulseAudio seems to be the standard solution.

As always, thanks for any help or steps in the right direction!

Sincerely,

-- 
William D. Jones <thor0505%comcast.net@localhost>