[luke1701]

Apart from some driver issues when I upgraded to v18 six months ago I've been using my litle Nvidia Ion SFF PC for a few years with perfectly smooth h264 video. Recently I started getting really poor quality and stuttering audio. Strangely I've found out that I've got high CPU, but not just when playing content, even when it's been booted for ages and seemingly doing nothing. Any ideas?

Previous issue for reference

Current debug log 

[graysky]

As mentioned previously (you'll have to search I can't at the moment), the CPU% is a function of the max frequency.  If you're using a power saving CPU governor, the % may look high if the max frequency is low.  You can test this by first seeing what governor you're using and what the frequency is on idle.  Test by switching to a full speed governor and seeing what average idle is.

I really like psrecord for these analyses.  With the optional dependency, you get a nice graph as the output.