Native play function slows down emacs on RH 7.3

Native play function slows down emacs on RH 7.3

[TV Raman]

I found this initially with the latest 21 pretest, but on further
checking , the problems appears to be present on the 21.2.1 
build bundled by Redhat 7.3.

If you use the built-in play-sound function, 
things feel  slower than when using (shell-command "play "...)

It's hard to articulate the "feel slower" bit --
but at least when I switched emacspeak to start using play-sound,
the rest of emacs felt sluggish.

-- 
Best Regards,
--raman
------------------------------------------------------------
T. V. Raman:  PhD (Cornell University)
IBM Research: Human Language Technologies
Architect:    Conversational And Multimodal WWW Standards
Phone:        1 (408) 927 2608   T-Line 457-2608
Fax:        1 (408) 927 3012
Email:        tvraman@us.ibm.com
WWW:      http://www.cs.cornell.edu/home/raman
AIM:      TVRaman
PGP:          http://emacspeak.sf.net/raman.asc
Snail:        IBM Almaden Research Center,
              650 Harry Road
              San Jose 95120

Re: Native play function slows down emacs on RH 7.3

[Richard Stallman]

    If you use the built-in play-sound function, 
    things feel  slower than when using (shell-command "play "...)

    It's hard to articulate the "feel slower" bit --
    but at least when I switched emacspeak to start using play-sound,
    the rest of emacs felt sluggish.

Can you investigate a little--by seeing what method Emacs uses to play
a sound, and what method the `play' program uses?  Maybe we're not
using the best method, or we might be using it wrong.

Unfortunately I know next to nothing about the facilities for playing
sound.

Re: Native play function slows down emacs on RH 7.3

[TV Raman]

I looked at the code in  src/sound.c --and things look okay with
respect to how the sound is played.

The problem is that the function as written is synchronous
--i.e. returns only ater the sound is done playing 
--which explains the slowness I perceived.

It might be useful to have the function parse its args, check the
validity of the sound data --and then 
fork to play the sound so emacs can continue what it is doing.
Richard Stallman writes:
 >     If you use the built-in play-sound function, 
 >     things feel  slower than when using (shell-command "play "...)
 > 
 >     It's hard to articulate the "feel slower" bit --
 >     but at least when I switched emacspeak to start using play-sound,
 >     the rest of emacs felt sluggish.
 > 
 > Can you investigate a little--by seeing what method Emacs uses to play
 > a sound, and what method the `play' program uses?  Maybe we're not
 > using the best method, or we might be using it wrong.
 > 
 > Unfortunately I know next to nothing about the facilities for playing
 > sound.

-- 
Best Regards,
--raman
------------------------------------------------------------
T. V. Raman:  PhD (Cornell University)
IBM Research: Human Language Technologies
Architect:    Conversational And Multimodal WWW Standards
Phone:        1 (408) 927 2608   T-Line 457-2608
Fax:        1 (408) 927 3012
Email:        tvraman@us.ibm.com
WWW:      http://www.cs.cornell.edu/home/raman
AIM:      TVRaman
PGP:          http://emacspeak.sf.net/raman.asc
Snail:        IBM Almaden Research Center,
              650 Harry Road
              San Jose 95120