I’m using mopidy with extensions: spotify, mpd, softwaremixer, local and during the playback at least 17% is the cpu usage if a flac file is played, 27% with spotify content. The original MPD has max 5% cpu usage but 1.5% in average.
Why is that high cpu usage? It runs on cubieboard2 with A20 soc with 2x 1ghz ARM7 cpu
Ignoring Spotify (since MPD doesn’t support it) then it’s 17% vs 1.5% and that’s probably the cost of python vs c. If you can find performance improvements then please do.
But the expensive work(decoding, sound output) is done by the gstreamer libraries, which is C.
Be worth comparing the cpu usage of Mopidy and playing a flac directly with gst-launch (using the same output pipeline).
And also check if you are doing any upsampling.