It might be faster to find a module to play the sound, instead of running an external process. It takes more time to start up a new process than for your program to do something itself.
The time to start up a new process is short and predictable. My problem is with latency, which is a long and unpredictable time. (I've also had a lot of problems with Audio::Play in the past, one of which is that it doesn't compile on my Debian system, and it's not available as a precompiled Debian package.)

You could try waking up slightly before you actually want to play the sound, then reading the sound into memory, going into a tight loop briefly, or doing something else that will make sure your program is all ready to go by the time it needs to be.
Sure, I'm just trying to find a way to make my program not be a cpu hog.

In reply to Re^2: making something happen in real time by bcrowell2
in thread making something happen in real time by bcrowell2

Title:
Use:  <p> text here (a paragraph) </p>
and:  <code> code here </code>
to format your post, it's "PerlMonks-approved HTML":


  • Posts are HTML formatted. Put <p> </p> tags around your paragraphs. Put <code> </code> tags around your code and data!
  • Titles consisting of a single word are discouraged, and in most cases are disallowed outright.
  • Read Where should I post X? if you're not absolutely sure you're posting in the right place.
  • Please read these before you post! —
  • Posts may use any of the Perl Monks Approved HTML tags:
    a, abbr, b, big, blockquote, br, caption, center, col, colgroup, dd, del, details, div, dl, dt, em, font, h1, h2, h3, h4, h5, h6, hr, i, ins, li, ol, p, pre, readmore, small, span, spoiler, strike, strong, sub, summary, sup, table, tbody, td, tfoot, th, thead, tr, tt, u, ul, wbr
  • You may need to use entities for some characters, as follows. (Exception: Within code tags, you can put the characters literally.)
            For:     Use:
    & &amp;
    < &lt;
    > &gt;
    [ &#91;
    ] &#93;
  • Link using PerlMonks shortcuts! What shortcuts can I use for linking?
  • See Writeup Formatting Tips and other pages linked from there for more info.