Post AyahOVAoySS5M9pyRE by hailey@hails.org
 (DIR) More posts by hailey@hails.org
 (DIR) Post #AyahOCoXEZviPpGvCa by hailey@hails.org
       2025-09-25T09:46:19Z
       
       0 likes, 4 repeats
       
       tip: if you use discord.com in firefox on linux, disable media autoplay to save about 1w of continuous power draw
       
 (DIR) Post #AyahODqhO1FrcpIADI by hailey@hails.org
       2025-09-25T09:59:45Z
       
       2 likes, 2 repeats
       
       when trusted with autoplay, discord for some reason opens an audio playback stream just to play silence which causes pipewire to sit at 2% cpu with its alsa timer wakeup thread making about 750 syscalls per second, even when the tab is not visible
       
 (DIR) Post #AyahOMQnTgsqF6F6ae by hailey@hails.org
       2025-09-25T10:06:36Z
       
       0 likes, 0 repeats
       
       here's system power draw in watts over a span of about 10 minutes. the spikes show when I went in to firefox to change the autoplay setting and reload. I left the system idling for the rest of the time. that one setting seems to account for like 20% of baseline power draw
       
 (DIR) Post #AyahOVAoySS5M9pyRE by hailey@hails.org
       2025-09-26T05:07:59Z
       
       0 likes, 0 repeats
       
       did some more digging into this with the Firefox debugger and found the culprit: Discord is calling new AudioContext() on page load (from the trace, it looks like the constructor is called at the top level of a JS module), but only appears to actually use it for the soundboard and call recording feature.Still, it is this AudioContext existing which causes Firefox to open that silent output stream which ends up causing an extra watt of power draw on my system. Could probably be fixed in Firefox by constructing AudioContext in the suspended state, and only playing when anything is actually done with it.
       
 (DIR) Post #AyahOe7Fj5wf5hEkcq by hailey@hails.org
       2025-09-26T05:14:10Z
       
       0 likes, 0 repeats
       
       Confirmed! After overriding Discord's JS with this change I am no longer observing the problem. Nothing seems to be broken either 🤷‍♀️
       
 (DIR) Post #AyalD4HL1nXWZggmO0 by thatbrickster@shitposter.world
       2025-09-26T08:07:26.375624Z
       
       0 likes, 1 repeats
       
       @hailey Vivaldi and other Chromium flavours tend to use more CPU than Firefox does for media. X is a serial offender in both.