Timing a process

[Simon]

This is simple – just place time before the program, command or shell script that you want to run:

$ time HERest ....
real   4m3.111s
user   3m34.005s
sys    0m0.215s

The user time is the quantity of interest – it’s the amount of time actual spent running the program. On a busy shared machine, this might be considerably less that the “wall clock” time reported as real.

[Pilar O]

What if we want to time a process inside Festival, to time how long it takes to generate the utterances?

[Simon]

You can time Festival, just like any other program. But, to get meaningful results you may not want to run it in interactive mode. Create a script for Festival to execute (load your voice, synthesise a test set, exit) and time the execution of that:

$ time festival myscript.scm

where myscript.scm might contain something like

(voice_localdir_multisyn-rpx)
(SayText "My first sentence.")
(SayText "My second sentence.")
(SayText "...and so on...")
(quit)

Make the test set large enough so that the time spent loading the voice is not a significant portion of the execution time.

You should probably disable audio output too, which can be done by changing the playback method to use a command, and setting that command to be empty – add these lines to the top of the script

(Parameter.set 'Audio_Method 'Audio_Command)
(Parameter.set 'Audio_Command "")

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