For general information and discussion:

Just to be complete, I have finished a test run using totem to play long files to see GStreamer in use and it's demand on the system CPU. I tried several different files, including wav and mp3s. As it turns out, totem only has about 5 wps while playing both wav and mp3 files, so I am not hopeful in finding optimization in that code path to reduce the wakes.

My environment is a Panda running maverick netbook, with alsa 1.0.24 and the latest pulseaudio git head. I am using Powertop as root with the pid and time options to get the results.

regards, Kurt Taylor (irc krtaylor)