Re: Orca, Speech-dispatcher and power management

[Felipe Sateler <fsateler@gmail.com>]

On Jan 6, 2018 09:36, "Sam Hartman" <hartmans@debian.org> wrote:

>>>>> "Samuel" == Samuel Thibault <sthibault@debian.org> writes:

    Samuel> Hello,

    Samuel> Sam Hartman, on sam. 06 janv. 2018 06:09:44 -0500, wrote:
    >> * Will limiting the number of streams speech-dispatcher opens
    >> have any significant improvement.  Are there actual costs to
    >> having the sd_generic and sd_dummy streams open even when they
    >> are unneeded?

    Samuel> I don't think there is: they remain dormant.

So, this is more of a Pulse question.
We know even dormant streams are sufficient to keep the audio card from
suspending.
I don't know if dormant streams have mixing overhead or impact the
volume algorithms being used.

This depends on what dormant means, I think. Dormant audio can mean:

1. Steady stream of 0s.

2. Pausing (corking in pulse-speak) the stream.

3. Closing the stream entirely.

We know option 3 has not been taken. We can try to determine if 1 or 2 with the output of `pactl list` while the system is idle.

I'm not at my laptop so I can't check if we have it by default (we should), but do you have suspend-on-idle module enabled? This information should appear in the pactl list output. 

IIRC, suspension cannot happen as long as any stream is connected, even when corked. 

Saludos,
Felipe Sateler