Re:Sometimes bad responsiveness with outloud and alsa 1.0.16

["Tim Cross" <tcross@xxxxxxxxxxx>]

Hi Lukas, 

I am noticing the same problem. In addition, I've noticed that whith
character echo on, each character is spoken very slowly and it is very easy
to get way ahead in your typing compared to what is being echoed.  I've
only noticed this in the last day and its not consistent. sometimes,
character echo is fine, then it will begin to get really slow and confusing
as you get a word or so in front with the typing compared to what is being
spoken. 

I'm running a 2.6.24 kernel, libasound2 1.0.16-2, emacs 23.0.6 from 27
March and emacspeak from CVS for the same day (Australian time). 

I'v not tried running it under a console, so don't know about C-n, C-p, but
will try it out and let you know. Since updating to the current emacs
version, I've also had emacs crash with signal 11 se faults a few times
while browsing web pages (using both w3 and w3m), so I suspect its a
browse-url issue. 

I have been using emacs with dbus support with no issues. I'm also using
the new emacs font backend with freetype and xft and a utf-8 locale with
emacspeak-unibyte set to nil. I have this setup on a Debian unstable box
(which has been working fine, but is running emacs from CVS that is about 1
week old) and on a Debian testing install, with some packages from unstable
such as the kernel and emacs-snapshot/w3m-el-snapshot. I only seem to be
noticing the problems with the more recent versions of emacs, emacspeak on
the debian testing box. 

I will update and see how things go. I've noticed that the few times I've
run into problems with CVS emacs, it tends to be fixed within a day or so. 

Note that I find all of this semi-expected. This is what happens when you
run a lot of CVS code. I'll also try running emacs 22.1 and the
emacs-snapshot packages and see if I get the same issues. 

Tim




Lukas Loehrer writes:
 > 
 > On Debian sid with libasound2-1.0.16-2, I am getting very bad
 > responsiveness with the outloud speech server in some situations. The
 > problem goes away after downgrading to libasound2 1.0.15-3.
 > 
 > Responsiveness is not generally bad, but only in some situations. The
 > problem is easier to see with low speech-rates. The problem is for
 > example reproducible in in an info buffer when cycling from links to
 > links with the tab key. Voice locking must be enabled.
 > 
 > 1. Hit tab to jump to a link
 > 2. wait a bit until emacspeak is in the middle of reading the actual link text
 > 3. Hit tab again to get to the next link
 > 
 > What should happen: speech should stop imediately and the next link should be read.
 > What happens with libasound 1.0.16-2: The text of the first link is read to the end and then the text of the second link is read.
 > 
 > Similar effects can be observed when moving through code line by line
 > and some font-locking is present. 
 > 
 > I have not yet been able to nail down the problem to a specific alsa
 > api call, but it is probably either snd_pcm_writei() or snd_pcm_drop()
 > whose behavior must have  changed in a subtle way in 1.0.16. I cannot produce
 > a short test case that reproduces the problem, so reporting the bug to
 > either Debian or Alsa is difficult. Can anyone reproduce the described
 > behavior?
 > 
 > Best regards, Lukas
 > 
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-- 
Tim Cross
tcross@xxxxxxxxxxx

There are two types of people in IT - those who do not manage what they 
understand and those who do not understand what they manage.

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