pulse audio using too much cpu

Question

I'm running a Centos 7 desktop with gnome, although similar issues regularly come up with Arch and other distros.

When I checked my cpu usage via top, pulseaudio was using nearly 20% cpu.

I hunted around for solutions and there were a lot of incorrect ones, so I'm posting here for karma points to help others.

Answer 1

May also be related to firefox. If it only happens with FF, you can try this

Speech dispatcher requests a rather low latency and so the CPU load will go up. you can switch it off with: media.webspeech.synth.enabled in firefox about:config

from https://bugzilla.redhat.com/show_bug.cgi?id=1925810