Pulseaudio network server on slow laptop

[AcIDx0]

Hi all,

I have got an ancient COMPAQ Presario 1247 laptop which has an AMD K6 3DNow! processor and (i think) 64Mb ram. It has a DLink wifi g pcmcia card for networking.

I decided to turn it into a networked sound card i.e. run dedicated pulseaudio server to accept connections from the network.

I installed Debian lenny on it, with pulsaudio (0.9.10), avahi and alsa packages, and configured everything.

When I use paplay to play a local file, the sound is not choppy and everything plays fine.

When I stream sound from another computer - the playback is choppy. I googled and found several guides on tuning the values in /etc/pulse/daemon.conf but those did not help.

Is there anything to do, or is this machine just too old for that? If it is too old, will adding another 64mb ram really help?

Thank you.

[AcIDx0]

Bump. Really? nobody knows? I googled minimal requirements for pulseaudio server, but the pages seem to talk about packages, and not hardware. The audio plays fine when it's local, so the problem is with streaming.

Once, I have installed same configuration on a desktop PIII with 256MB ram, and it was a wired connection. This worked fine.

Anyone has any insights on how I could make the system not skip the sound?

Thanks.

[markbuntu]

Run top and see if maybe something, like the wifi, is hogging the cpu or ram. That is not very much ram, it can easily get filled up by the wifi or pulseaudio buffers not to mention the kernel or xorg.

[me13221]

Hi all,

I have got an ancient COMPAQ Presario 1247 laptop which has an AMD K6 3DNow! processor and (i think) 64Mb ram. It has a DLink wifi g pcmcia card for networking.

I decided to turn it into a networked sound card i.e. run dedicated pulseaudio server to accept connections from the network.

I installed Debian lenny on it, with pulsaudio (0.9.10), avahi and alsa packages, and configured everything.

When I use paplay to play a local file, the sound is not choppy and everything plays fine.

When I stream sound from another computer - the playback is choppy. I googled and found several guides on tuning the values in /etc/pulse/daemon.conf but those did not help.

Is there anything to do, or is this machine just too old for that? If it is too old, will adding another 64mb ram really help?

Thank you.

Would you mind explaining how you got the system set up? I would like to stream audio from one device to another running a pulseaudio server but I don't know how.

Also, it doesn't seem like any computer (less than 15 years old) could be "too slow" to play sound-- it seems more likely to me that you have a bad network connection. I know my laptop (a Lenovo x200 - the saddest heir to the great Thinkpad lineage ever built) will simply crap out on wi-fi for seconds at a time.

Does the problem go away on a wired configuration?

[AcIDx0]

Would you mind explaining how you got the system set up? I would like to stream audio from one device to another running a pulseaudio server but I don't know how.

Also, it doesn't seem like any computer (less than 15 years old) could be "too slow" to play sound-- it seems more likely to me that you have a bad network connection. I know my laptop (a Lenovo x200 - the saddest heir to the great Thinkpad lineage ever built) will simply crap out on wi-fi for seconds at a time.

Does the problem go away on a wired configuration?

me13221,

There are hundreds of howtos. Here, start by doing this.

[AcIDx0]

Run top and see if maybe something, like the wifi, is hogging the cpu or ram. That is not very much ram, it can easily get filled up by the wifi or pulseaudio buffers not to mention the kernel or xorg.

Thanks for the great and so obvious idea which I did not think of (at least I googled everything I could think of)

Anyway, I discovered CPU was ~1% at rest, and about 50% at work occupied mostly by pulseaudio. However, there is about 1mb of memory left free. I guess I need to try to add new memory to the laptop. It seems like pulseaudio is really on the edge.

Do you think trying a wired connection will use less CPU, and thus work better?

[AcIDx0]

Hi all,

So I added another 128mb of ram. Now up to 160. There are ~90mb of ram free at all times. The audio is still unbearably choppy.

Still have to try wired connection (don't have a wired PCMCIA, need to borrow from somewhere)

Anything else I can do?

The audio is really choppy for no apparent reason.

Thanks.

[markbuntu]

There can be a number of problems. Stop pulseaudio and run it from a terminal like this

pulseaudio -vvvv

This will give you a lot of messages from pulseaudio about what it is doing and maybe help you figure out what is going on.

[AcIDx0]

There are no apparent error messages when I do that. Except "Memory block too large for pool"

But they come out on startup, and not during play....


I played with the buffer size, namely
default-fragments =
default-fragment-size-msec =

and set them to bigger values. It became better, but still the interruptions are very noticeable.

I googled the buffer size issue extensively, but did not come to a solution. I still have not tried a wired card - I don't know where to get one. I don't want to buy only to try.

[AcIDx0]

Well, got a wired NIC for this, but still no banana. I guess this processor is too slow to do networking and sound together, although it is really strange.

Does anyone have any suggestions on how to fix it?

I think I am going to turn this thing into a picture frame and get a faster laptop for pulseaudio server.