You are paying a price for it.
Yes if your sound card has a onboard mixer alsa supports hardware acceleration
of audio mixing there will be almost no cpu load at all.
Soft disabling pulseaudio also nastly fails on non hardware mixing cards. No
matter how much I have asked the developer of pulseaudio to enable auto starting
of dmix or a warning that no mixing is provided he has flatly refused to do
either. So effectively left with a crippled audio setup if your card does not
have hardware audio mixing. Yes Ubuntu has made it extremely hard to use the
lightest audio setup.
http://lwn.net/Articles/268937/ << Hopefully Ubuntu build with cgroup in
kernel. Thinking in newer Linux kernel you have to go out of your way to
disable it. When building kernel from source graphical configuration don't
even give you the option to disable it. Since its classed as kinda key feature.
Cgroups can do a lot more than just memory control they can also control what
devices a application can access, network access what percentage and ammount of
cpu time applications get. Really useful tool for misbehaving programs.
Thing most people are not aware is that all processes in kernels with cgroups
enabled are always running in a cgroup. The default cgroup. Any process
that a application starts remains in the cgroup the application that started it
is in unless assigned else where.
Becareful with them very powerful tool. Highly useful. Controlling cgroups is
one time where running as root/admin is kinda required. Knowing the process
id of a normal users shell allows that to be transfered into cgroup to run wine.
echo $$ will tell you the PID of current bash.
