When i am running power top command I notice pulse audio is consuming a lot of power sometime it is consuming power more than CPU and it is drastically decreasing my battery life some times close to half .
I have installed tlp, tlpui, intel microcode, auto-cpufreq to optimize my battery. Ihave checked out arch wiki but there is no solution for this . So can someone tell me how to decrease power consumed by pulse audio (i have tried to kill the program but them my earphones are not working).
Power est. Usage Events/s Category Description
3.14 W 555.6 us/s 2.2 Process [PID 1373] /usr/bin/pulseaudio --daemonize=no --log- targ
2.80 W 5.3% Device Display backlight
1.14 W 986.6 ms/s 7.5 kWork intel_atomic_commit_work
By default, audio power saving is turned off by most drivers. It can be enabled by setting the power_save parameter; a time (in seconds) to go into idle mode. To idle the audio card after one second, create the following file for Intel soundcards.
i dont see any audio_powersave.conf file in /etc.modprobe.d/ directory and i found a solution asking to remove pulse audio and replace with ALSA is it worth trying reddit
No there is no change is there anything to do and do i need to add a # before the argument load-module module-suspend-on-idle in file /etc/pulse/default.pa in pulse audio and should i need to disabling the HDMI audio output, by blacklisting.
Power est. Usage Events/s Category Description
3.27 W 302.6 us/s 2.5 Process [PID 1384] /usr/bin/pulseaudio --daemonize=no --log-target=journal
3.20 W 5.3% Device Display backlight
1.12 W 0.0 pkts/s Device Network interface: enp4s0 (r8169)
379 mW 105.5 pkts/s Device Network interface: wlp0s20f3 (iwlwifi)
If you add a ‘#’ to comment out module-suspend-on-idle that will likely increase power use
module-suspend-on-idle | freedesktop.org - PulseAudio Documentation
ALSA uses considerably more CPU cycles when pulseaudio has to send empty data to the soundcard during idle. If you don’t plan to have an active stream all the time, set the timer to a low value for best power savings
It may help reduce power by reducing the suspend timeout setting exit-idle-time in /etc/pulse/daemon.conf - default timeout is 20 seconds
pulse-daemon.conf(5) — Arch manual pages exit-idle-time= Terminate the daemon after the last client quit and this time in seconds passed. Use a negative value to disable this feature. Defaults to 20.
I suspect that 3.27w is total power used for audio - PulseAudio + ALSA + speakers/headphones
that amount of power would be typical for laptop speakers or headphones
Turning off unused input and output devices in ALSA may reduce power but I would not expect much difference if the devices were not in use anyway. If you can reduce audio levels that would be more likely to reduce power