This issue was originally brought up by Antoine Schmitt on the fluid-dev mailing list. Antoine found that short note durations (around 7ms duration percussion events in his tests) were being lost and would not sound at all. This appears to be a problem with the way in which FluidSynth processes events. Although the internal FluidSynth audio buffer is usually 64 samples, audio drivers typically process segments of audio in much larger chunks, which leads to note on/off events of short notes occuring within the same audio block. A re-design of the event system is likely in order.
Link to start of original thread:
http://lists.gnu.org/archive/html/fluid-dev/2007-05/msg00000.html

Reported by: elementgreen

Original Ticket: fluidsynth/tickets/1