I'm using a P200 MMX with 160MB RAM compiling the latest KOffice from 
CVS and KDE2 makes its sounds almost without delay. At least I can't 
say how many milliseconds it could be, but it's definetly way below 1.5 
seconds.

On Don, 31 Aug 2000, Matthias Ettrich wrote:
> Reggie and I tried the sound notifications today, on a dual P3 600
> machine with enough memory.
>
> The best thing we can say is that it works, sort of. The delay
> between making a window unsticky and actually hearing a sound is
> something like 1.5 seconds.
>
> This is not acceptable.
>
> I browsed a bit in the code. There are several reasons for the
> slowness:
>
> - the problem is *not* dcop that is used to communicate between kwin
> and knotify. DCOP easily makes something like 4000 sends *per*
> second* on a machine like this.
>
> - knotify, when receiving a message, first reads in several kconfig
> files. That is completely pointless. It should store the config
> objects and be signalled any changes from the control center module
> to call "repareConfiguration." Charles and Stefan, you both are
> listed as authors, can you please fix that?
>
> - arts, when playing a sound file, doesn't seem to do any caching
> whatsoever but prints out lots of debug output instead.
>
> Still the debug output and the missing caching cannot be it. It's
> actually faster to launch a console application to play that sound
> (like 'cat').
>
> Do we have minor optimization issues here or a conceptual problem?
> Until somebody conviences me otherwise, I assume a conceptual
> problem. Arts apparently isn't suited for playing sounds. Wasn't that
> what the KDE sound server was about?
>
>
> Matthias