Sending Audio to Browser - Performance issue

Question

Hi,
I have written a simple jsp page that retrieves an OrdAudio object from the database and sends it to the browser. I have done this before with images, which worked perfectly. For the audio files, I simply changed the image specific code to work with audio.
The problem is that for an approximately 100KB audio file, it takes a good two minutes for it to play in the browser. Over a broadband connection this seems pretty slow. Is there a way to improve this?
here is part of my code:
// create OrdAudio instance
OrdAudio media = (OrdAudio)result.getCustomDatum(1, OrdAudio.getFactory());
// set page context and send audio to browser
handler.setPageContext(pageContext);
handler.sendAudio(media);

Answer 1

This doesn't sound right. One thing that caught me eye is that you are measuring the time that the audio "plays in the browser." Is there any chance that this 100kb file has a 100sec audio duration? How long should it take to play this audio file?
One way to debug is to change the mid-tier logic to save the file to the local disk instead of sending it back on the HTTP response. You can use the method getDataInFile(java.lang.String filename) where filename is a string representing the full path to a local fiel that you have permission to write to. If you time this call, you can measure how long it takes to fetch the data from the database.
The other issue concerns the client side HTML coding. What are you coding to accept the audio data? Browsers accept images (JPEG and GIF) natively but plugins are required to accept audio data. How is this being handled?