Can we ix the link speech pauses already?

[Trevor Saunders]

On Fri, Nov 26, 2010 at 12:01:21PM -0600, Nolan Darilek wrote:
> Hey folks.
> 
> Man this is an infuriating bug. Sometimes I have to wait for upwards
> of a minute for Orca to process a long batch of links in continuous
> read. I can't believe this isn't bothering anyone else as much as it
> does me, but I lose so much of my day while Orca twiddles its
> virtual thumbs doing gods know what. And it's not like I can stop
> Orca from reading these links once it starts, as it seems like you
> can only stop speech if it's actually speaking, so I have to play a
> game of whack-a-mole and pound control as soon as speech starts in
> order to keep the long list of links from being trotted out.
> 
> I know that we thought we had a solution at one point, then the
> OpenTTS/SD fork madness swallowed the change. I just have a hard
> time believing that this is where the investigation ends. Can we
> look through commits made to OpenTTS in mid-May and see if one may
> have changed something?
> 
> Or can someone with more experience with such things than I, I
> dunno, profile this code or something? I know we don't know why this
> is happening, but it isn't as if there's no way to find out.

well, it looks like what ever the problem is its in orca somewhere.  I
made a test page with 50 links in a row and had orca read it.  Heres
some of the output of top while that was going on.

  PID USER      PR  NI  VIRT  RES  SHR S %CPU %MEM    TIME+  COMMAND
 3964 tbsaunde  20   0  298m  29m 4172 S   56  1.5  18:54.71 python
 4088 tbsaunde  20   0  559m 182m  16m R   51  9.2  22:28.61 firefox-bin
 3626 tbsaunde  20   0  133m 4144 2264 S    6  0.2   1:36.60 at-spi-registry
24902 root      20   0  139m 4612 2748 S    3  0.2   0:50.60 sd_espeak
25672 tbsaunde  20   0 19064 1380 1000 R    1  0.1   0:00.05 top
22432 root      20   0 98.3m 1712  836 S    0  0.1   0:28.14 speech-dispatch
    1 root      20   0  8352  656  540 S    0  0.0   0:01.36 init

 From this the activity of speech dispatcher sd_espeak looks reasonable,
 this is a highlevel look so it may well be missing something, but it
 doesn't look like there is a problem there.  On the other hand python
 and firefox are burning up a lot of cycles, and at-spi-registryd is
 using a bit more than I think it usually does.  Since I have no
 experience profiling python or other wise find hotspots in it someone
 else with that knowledge will have to start looking at what's going on
 here.

 Trev

> I'm sorry that all I can do is cheerlead, but my area is Android
> accessibility and  high-level languages, not C and low-level stuff,
> so unless someone tells me how to get useful profiling information
> I'm not of much help. And I've got a lot to do contributing to that
> particular house of cards.
> 
> But I find it hard to believe that we have to wait for a lightning
> bolt of inspiration to strike here. Has anyone profiled SD/Orca
> reading links continuously and figured out what's going on? Or is
> there a known solution in the pipeline?
> 
> This message brought to you by my netbook, on which this bug is even
> *more* painful than it is on my dual-core desktop with 4G of RAM.
> 
> Thanks.
> 
> 
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