Found while checking whether a player had reported this before: the code already
carried a prior analysis of this exact error which deliberately decided NOT to
act on it, concluding the 2026-07-23 atomic-delete fix (a999e5c) had settled it
with "no field complaints since", and that the remaining exhaustion was
transient and likely sub-perceptual.
That claim did not hold, and the note was still sitting there to mislead the next
reader. All five 4.11.674 player logs are saturated: 3031/4657/5245/6275/6571
failures, first one ~10% into a match, still failing at 97%.
The prior note's core reasoning was about raising the source BUDGET -- more
voices mixing = more CPU during heavy combat -- and it is sound; BT_AUDIO_SOURCES
stays opt-in and unset. But it does not apply to pooling, which changes no
budget: idle pooled sources are stopped and detached and cost nothing to mix.
The note asks whoever touches this to measure frame time, so I did, same bench
both ways:
pre-fix 8.672 ms weighted avg over 9390 frames
post-fix 7.794 ms weighted avg over 10047 frames
Removing ~20k alGenSources/alDeleteSources driver calls per match is a net CPU
WIN, not a cost. Single run each, so indicative rather than definitive, but it
points the opposite way from the concern.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 (1M context) <noreply@anthropic.com>
