Comment 1 by jteh on 2013-07-03 03:33
Freezing like this is generally because the application responded very slowly to queries. Are you saying you see no lag at all with the other screen reader you tried while trying to interact with Audacity (not other applications)? Even if it didn't freeze completely, I'd expect some pretty severe lag from all screen readers if it is affecting NVDA this way.

Comment 2 by k_kolev1985 on 2013-07-05 12:49
Hello,

My friend who uses JAWS (v10) and Audacity reported that there is a delay (not a freeze however), but his machine is a very slow one for today's standards (single-core, 1.6GHz processor, 768MB RAM with Windows XP).

On my machine with a Core 2 Duo processor at 2.8GHz, 3.25GB of usable RAM and Windows 7, NVDA can't read those dialogs due to the freeze. I've tested the same with a demo of SuperNova witch I have at present on my system for test purposes, there was no delay at all, as far as I could see. The only problem with SuperNova reading those dialogs was that it was trying to constantly read the changing text in those dialogs (elapsed and remaining time) and was constantly repeating those time values.

Comment 4 by jteh on 2014-02-05 08:26
I can't reproduce this in either 2013.3 or current next. Sometimes, things get a bit laggy, but i don't get a total freeze. Can you still reproduce this?

Comment 5 by k_kolev1985 on 2014-02-05 11:08
Yes, I can still reproduce the freeze, even with the latest "next-10304,4e28381" snapshot. After switching to another application, the freeze stops, until I go back to Audacity while it is performing an operation (such as exporting to MP3). But that freeze may be due to my machine - an Intel(R) Core(TM)2 Duo CPU, E7400 at 2.80GHz and 3,25GB of usable RAM memory - it may be too slow (?).

Comment 6 by jteh on 2014-02-07 12:24
It's not so much about the speed of the machine, though that will obviously have some impact. To explain in short what's happening, I suspect Audacity is performing the task in the same thread as the user interface. Audacity updates the progress bar (which notifies NVDA), then immediately continues with the task for a while. While it's performing the task, it can't respond to requests about the UI. Unfortunately, that means it can't respond to NVDA, hence the freeze/sluggishness. On my system, I don't get a comlete freeze--things just get very slow--but ultimately, it's the same issue. If NVDA ignored notifications from the progress bar, it mightn't freeze, but that would be undesirable in most cases.

It would be interesting to know if this works with the latest version of Audacity. CC @derekriemer Regardless, #3316 (comment) may be a good reason to close this.

This still can happen, but much less.

@Robert-J-H, your thoughts on this are very appreciated.
I think it is rather related to the power of the processor rather than NVDA itself. Audacity needs lot of ressources when complex tasks are being processed.
The same behavior can be seen when running an anti-virus scan with Avast or Malwarebytes.

@k_kolev1985 can you still reproduce this in Audacity?

I haven't worked with Audacity recently and haven't noticed, but this issue seams to be really solved. So yes, it can be closed.

Closing as worksforme