Re: [orca-list] systemrequirements for orca?

[Michael Whapples <mwhapples aim com>]

Hello,
I notice similar on my system, a 2.4 GHz pentium4 with 1.5Gb ram. It
also shows itself on my laptop which is a pentium-m 1.70GHz (I think, it
was at the time just after intel changed the numbering to be an abitrary
scale rather than listing specs) with 512 Mb ram. I think I may have
mentioned about the performance before and said that while Orca is good
at providing accessibility it lacks useability as it performs too slow
in some cases, and that I feel rather than keep adding features, the
performance needs some attention. I will make some further comments
directly related to what has been mentioned in line with that text.
On Sun, 2007-11-18 at 23:01 +0100, Halim Sahin wrote:
> Hi Luke,
> On Mo, Nov 19, 2007 at 06:41:27 +1100, Luke Yelavich wrote:
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> > Hash: SHA1
> >
> > On Mon, Nov 19, 2007 at 04:34:28AM EST, Halim Sahin wrote:
> > > Hi,
> > >
> > > What are the recommendations to run orca in an usable speed
> > > (CPU, RAM)?
> >
> > The lowest spec system I've run Orca on is a celeron 1Ghz with 256MB of RAM, and it ran quite nicely. I 
> > don't know 
> > how much lower specs would be comfortable though.
>
> I am running orca on a machine with 2 GB ram and with a Pentium 4 with 2400
> MHz.
>
> My Problem is, that orca does not respond very fast in some cases.
> I tried debian sid, ubutntu gutsy/gento.
> Undr Gento there is a gnome 2.18 running.
> Debian/ubuntu are using gnome 2.20.
> The gnome 2.18 works a bit faster than the other but 
> in my opinion they are too slow for real work.
> I don't know if these problems are orca related but they are in my
> opinion critical ones.
>
>
>
> I will give you some examples:
> 1. Nautilus:
> It takes sometimes 30 Sek to get a browseable file window if opening a
> folder with a few hundret files in it.
> Was this what you mentioned before about nautilus? May be I mis-understood. If I open /usr/bin/ (which 
> contains a good number of files, that window is non responsive, but I can alt-tab away and do other stuff 
> with orca, can you?

> 2. closing a window with alt+f4 takes some times more than 3 or 4 sec.
> At this time orca isn't able to do something else in other opened windows.
> I observe this with a good number of apps as well.
> 3. when you press alt+f2 it takes about 2/3 sec to get feedback from
> orca and navigating in this dialog is a bit slow.
> Same here.
> 4. opening the preferences menu in evolution takes on my machine CA. 7
> Sec.
> I haven't timed it, but it is extremely slow, and I think in the past I have sometimes started wondering 
> whether it was actually going to open.
> ..............
>
> My Questions:
>
> are this  problems accessibility related or are the mentioned apps 
> in general slow.
> I don't know on this as I am always using orca.
> Do I need a faster Machine?
I would hope not, on my laptop I have windows installed as well and
windows with window-eyes runs faster than gnome and orca.
> How are the other orca users deal with this stuff?
I use the text console with speakup mainly and normally only go to the
GUI when the text console isn't enough (eg. those awful websites that
require firefox or IE to be used, although using firefox with orca is
also extremely painful with its speed).
> What can be the problem here?
Many things may be responsible, and orca could be one. Although python
is good, for time critical operations sometimes it can be slow so it
might require some parts which are now settled to be rewritten in C,
although just optimising the python code might make a difference (and
some optimisations can be quite unusual in python, from what I am
finding in my own projects).
> Regards
> Halim