[orca-list] Concerns about Orca's performance



Hi everyone
Well, I'd like to bring this issue up and see what comes of it. I've noticed that, in most situations, Orca can sometimes be very laggy on all but high-performance desktops. Let me give a few examples (from my netbook, but this can apply to almost any single core and lower- performing dual core systems): 1. Bringing up the file open dialog in most applications happens quickly, but it can take up to two seconds for Orca to respond and notify that the dialog is up. Orca itself doesn't seem to lag the desktop at all, but there's a significant delay before I'm notified about certain events. This applies to any dialog, file open is the quickest example however. 2. Sometimes when typing into text fields in scripted applications or those based on Xul such as Firefox and Thunderbird, my typing is significantly lagged. For example, I finish typing a sentence and yet only two words have been typed, with the rest of the letters slowly appearing one about every half second. If I attempt to backspace or otherwise navigate, then each letter begins to be spoken along with the entire desktop slowing down until the typing has finished. Note that I have keyboard echo turned off completely. 3. When navigating any table for the first time, i.e. the first select once a table has been focused, a very odd behavior starts and continues for a second or so. Essentially the first column of the table gets repeated over and over again while getting interrupted each time. It's a bit hard to explain, so I'll give an example of what I here. In the file open dialog, say I'm navigating to the item that is called "Desktop," and it is one down from where I have focused when entering the table. This is what I hear: Desktop, image image im im im image desktop today. The column focused gets spoken but then gets interrupted by an image, which I'm assuming is an icon representing the file, and orca repeatedly interrupts itself to try and start reading the entire row and eventually settles down. Attempting to navigate while this is happening can cause a number of odd behaviors such as Orca crashes, queued keystrokes, or desktop freeze.

These are the three examples I can reproduce reliably of some of the performance issues I've had with Orca for a long time (way before the code refactor). These will be noticed more on a lower spec machine than a high-powered quad core, for example, and I'm really starting to feel them now on my netbook. HOwever, the os doesn't seem to make a difference, be it Opensolaris or Linux or FreeBSD, or even OS X. I've also tried espeak, festival and ibmtts (on Linux only for ibmtts obviously) both with gnome-speech and speech dispatcher and with every audio system each platform provides. I don't notice any difference, so I've ruled out audio or synthesizer-specific issues for the moment. I can provide debugging logs for each of these as I can easily reproduce them. I wasn't sure if there's already a bug tracking issues such as this, or if anyone else is having them. Is anyone else seeing this? Do braille users notice this type of lag too or is it specific to speech? Is there a bug tracking this or should a new one be opened?
Thanks



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