dogtail at-spi seems very slow on my app

[Wallace Owen <owen metamachine com>]

dogtail-siff runs very slowly on my app, and so do my python scripts
that use dogtail to exercise my app.

When I run sniff and use it to poke around in gedit, or gvim, or pretty
much any other gtk app, it seems, if not snappy, not very slow.

But when I try to use it to inspect my application, selecting a r-arrow
in sniff  (to expand a container in my app) takes a long time (3-4
seconds, sometimes longer).  I notice that if it seems stuck, sometimes
merely moving the mouse over my app gets it un-stuck.

My theory was that because my app doesn't sit in gtk's main loop, but
instead calls this:
----
static void gtk_tick()
{
    /* Wait for an event to occur (like a key press or
     * mouse event) and process it. */
    while (gtk_events_pending())
    {
        gtk_main_iteration();
    }
}
----
about 4 times a second, that maybe I'm starving the accessibility code
(assuming it runs in my thread and was stealing cycles in gtk_main_loop
to move things about).  But I tested that by adding a second call to
gtk_main_iteration() in the while loop, and another just after the main
loop, thinking I'd be giving it more time, and it didn't seem to work.

Anyone got any clues?


  // Wally