Why the process priority of Pulseaudio is -11?

Question

Why it so low? Sometime when cpu is high load sound through Pulseaudio becomes choppy. I think this happens because process priority of Pulseaudio has so low value. So why it so low by default if it can cause problems.

Answer 1

High nice values correspond to low priorities for a process. So a nice value of -11 actually means that Pulse Audio is running with higher priority than most processes on the system.