Testing resource hunger of audioplayers
This test contains the basic audio players; DeadBeeF and Audacious. It contains the mediaplayer VLC, the very comprehensive Exaile and the database driven music managers; pMusic and Clementine. Of course, this is not a fair compete since features differs a lot from player to player. In the end, it might be less important how much system resources the player uses. The functionality is in most cases what makes our choice. But still, it's good to know when running a low-powered system, and when choosing the default player.

From my personal view, I am interesting to see how pMusic is working compared to other players. pMusic has got a lot of criticism of its hunger on cpu resources. I want to disprove this reputation.

The test

This is a low-powered netbook that makes it easier to measure the differences in cpu-usage. Running on a modern pc, none of these players will make your system hot.

VLC and DeadBeeF is installed by default. On this system I was able to run both Clementine and Exaile which is the most comparable to pMusic. Tried to install Amarok with no success. If you run another player of XenialPup 7.0.4, it would be great if you gave me a link to the pet/sfs. I am interested to extend my test with more players.

I have used the default setting for each player, and started the app at least twice to ensure no first-run operation misleads the test-result.

Audacious 3.6.2, Clemetine 1.2.3, DeaDBeeF 0.7.2, Exaile 3.2.2, pMusic 5.2.4, VLC 2.2.2

Cpu-usage playing mp3 with gui shown

Exaile 7.5 % 

VLC 8.3 % 

DeaDBeeF 8.8 % 

Audacious 10.0 % 

pMusic 12.1 % 

Clementine 18.2 %

Surprisingly. I guessed DeadBeef would be the winner because of its reputation of being lightweight. Exaile is a much more comprehensive option than DeadBeeF and Audicious, and still, it has less appetite for cpu-cycles.

Memory-usage playing mp3 with gui shown

Audacious 5 Mb 

DeaDBeeF 20 Mb 

Exaile 23 Mb 

VLC 25 Mb 

pMusic 29 Mb 

Clementine 33 Mb

Audicious is impressive. I had to verify it one more time. Let's mention that this is the Gtk gui - not the Winamp clone. Else, smaller range than expected. The guis differs from the simple (VLC) to the complex (Clementine), and I had expected the memory usage to differ more.

Size required for installation:

pMusic 1 Mb 

Audacious 8 Mb 

DeaDBeeF 10 Mb 

VLC 53 Mb 

Clementine 66 Mb 

Exaile 66 Mb

pMusic is built for Puppy, and take advantage of already existing dependencies. That makes it of course the smallest, but it is also the only player that is not compiled, and that is probably another reason for the result.

Clementine is overall the heavy choice. I hoped to compare with Amarok which I assume it is the biggest brother (153 Mb install), but I were not able to get it work in Xenial. Hopefully, someone make a pack some day, and I will update these results.

Posted on 15 Nov 2016, 02:58 by zigbert - Categories: Puppy
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