Comment 10 for bug 207135

I can confirm this too. Pulseaudio uses 10% of my cpu. I'm using a Pentium-M with 1,6Ghz here. Currently it's running with 600Mhz. First i play music via rhythmbox via pulseaudio

$ top
...
PID USER PR NI VIRT RES SHR S %CPU %MEM TIME+ COMMAND
 6304 user 20 0 30564 6276 3772 S 10.6 0.6 37:18.96 pulseaudio
 5817 root 20 0 254m 57m 11m S 5.3 5.7 32:50.67 Xorg
 29974 user 20 0 159m 40m 21m S 3.6 4.1 0:08.76 rhythmbox
 6283 user 20 0 13596 4716 3764 S 1.3 0.5 4:28.70 at-spi-registry
 29167 user 20 0 85560 21m 12m S 1.3 2.1 0:02.76 gnome-terminal
 ...

and now without pulseaudio

$ top
...
 PID USER PR NI VIRT RES SHR S %CPU %MEM TIME+ COMMAND
 5817 root 20 0 247m 50m 11m S 7.0 5.0 32:43.90 Xorg
 29974 user 20 0 157m 40m 21m S 2.7 4.0 0:05.47 rhythmbox
 6283 user 20 0 13596 4716 3764 S 1.3 0.5 4:27.37 at-spi-registry
 29167 user 20 0 85496 21m 12m S 1.3 2.1 0:02.48 gnome-terminal
 6349 user 20 0 16948 5928 4628 S 0.7 0.6 1:04.29 gnome-screensav
 6352 user 20 0 123m 46m 21m S 0.7 4.6 4:49.12 gnome-panel
 ...