Going back to a thread on Udoo, I read a post by Dan Wilcox saying he's disabling pulseaudio before launching Pd and provides this link http://voices.canonical.com/david.henningsson/2012/07/13/top-five-wrong-ways-to-fix-your-audio/ (post number 2).
That link (and Dan's mail) suggests typing the following:
echo autospawn=no > ~/.pulse/client.conf

I typed that in Odroid's terminal and got a "no such file or directory", so I created that directory and file and type autospawn=no inside the newly created client.conf file.

Then the post says to type this (Dan says to add it to ~/.bash_login, but the Odroid's got only ~/.bash_logout, should I create ~/.bash_login?):
pulseaudio -k

but when I typed it I got the following:
E: [pulseaudio] core-util.c: Failed to create secure directory (/home/odroid/.pulse): Operation not permitted
E: [pulseaudio] main.c: Failed to kill daemon: Operation not permitted

so I tried to do it with sudo and got this:
E: [pulseaudio] main.c: Failed to kill daemon: No such process

I know this is not a Linux audio mailing list, but I'm trying all this to avoid drop outs in Pd (I've got a Focusrite Scarlett 2i4, USB class compliant sound card), so thought of posting here.
Eventually, will disabling pulseaudio help improve Pd's performance?

OS is Debian Jessie for Odroid, Pd is 0.45-5 installed with apt-get.