pavucontrol forces pulseaudio process to consume 10% CPU at minimum

[Stephan Sokolow]

Normally, the pulseaudio process consumes 0% CPU when no audio is playing and, by selecting a more lightweight resampling algorithm, can be configured to consume any of these amounts of CPU on my AthlonII X2 270:

* 0% (no audio playing)
* 2% (one audio stream)
* 3% (one audio stream, tsched=0)
* 6-7% (two audio streams)
* 7-8% (two audio streams, tsched=0)

However, in all of the aforementioned cases, simply having pavucontrol open causes the pulseaudio process to idle at 10-12% CPU usage.

While I'm not 100% certain where the problem lies, I'm filing it on pavucontrol because alternative PulseAudio mixer GUIs such as veromix do not trigger this problem, even when configured to busy pulseaudio with queries by displaying volume meters on all channels, input and output.

ProblemType: Bug
DistroRelease: Ubuntu 14.04
Package: pavucontrol 2.0-2
ProcVersionSignature: Ubuntu 3.13.0-35.62-generic 3.13.11.6
Uname: Linux 3.13.0-35-generic x86_64
NonfreeKernelModules: nvidia
ApportVersion: 2.14.1-0ubuntu3.5
Architecture: amd64
CurrentDesktop: LXDE
Date: Wed Oct 8 03:55:58 2014
InstallationDate: Installed on 2014-08-01 (68 days ago)
InstallationMedia: Lubuntu 14.04 LTS "Trusty Tahr" - Release amd64 (20140416.2)
SourcePackage: pavucontrol
UpgradeStatus: No upgrade log present (probably fresh install)

[Thaddaeus Tintenfisch (thad-fisch-deactivatedaccount)]

I can confirm this bug. The pulseaudio process idles at 2% CPU usage in my case.

[Launchpad Janitor (janitor)]

Status changed to 'Confirmed' because the bug affects multiple users.