From: nospam@needed.invalid   
      
   On Thu, 9/4/2025 3:46 AM, Mike Scott wrote:   
   > An oddity, although resolved for now.   
   >   
   > On a new low-power machine, intended ultimately as headless. When I logged   
   in over ssh and ran top, I saw pipewire taking a steady perhaps 15% cpu: I   
   replaced with pulse, and pulse instead took 20% or so.   
   >   
   > In either case, and still running top on the ssh session, simply logging on   
   on the console made this drop virtually to 0%.   
   >   
   > I've resolved the issue by removing pipewire and disabling pulse with   
   systemctl, which is OK as I don't need audio for this box at all.   
   >   
   > But I'd love to know what's been going on. Can anyone shed light please?   
   >   
   >   
      
   There is an example here of the kinds of things that can happen.   
      
      https://gitlab.freedesktop.org/pipewire/pipewire/-/issues/1968   
      
   In that one, Firefox has a setting:   
      
      media.webspeech.synth.enabled   BOOLEAN  false      # In about:config   
      
   Any sources that "leak", or make a socket but don't use it,   
   can leave the thing doing some polling. Another example of a   
   leakage is apparently MIDI plumbing.   
      
   Another way for audio to burn cycles, is if the permissions on   
   a /dev/audio are not permissive and a service is poking the   
   hardware for nothing. In some ecosystems, logging to console   
   confers "ownership of hardware", and the perms on some hardware   
   devices become owned by the console owner.   
      
   You could try "strace" on a thing like that, and see if there   
   are any entries pointing to plumbing.   
      
   You can see in the above example bug report, there is a utility   
   called "pw-top" which shows activity feeding pipewire.   
      
            alsa_output.pci-0000_07_00.6.HiFi__hw_Generic_1__sink   
       46   + speech-dispatcher-espeak-ng   
       46   + speech-dispatcher-dummy   
       46   + Firefox   
      
   If you're making a true headless computer, you could install   
   a "server" version of an OS, instead of the desktop version,   
   and a whole bunch of cruft is not included. You are unlikely to   
   want this, but it is one way to ditch a bunch of stuff in one go.   
   For practice, I've started with a server distro, and added back   
   a desktop, just to see if I could do it. Metapackages provided   
   are cheating, and hide the details of adding back a desktop :-)   
      
      Paul   
      
   --- SoupGate-Win32 v1.05   
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