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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
The major difference between a thing that might go wrong and a
thing that cannot possibly go wrong is that when a thing that cannot
possibly go wrong goes wrong it usually turns out to be impossible to
get at or repair.
--Douglas Adams
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