[BioC] reducing hits from countGenomicOverlaps()

[Robert Castelo]

dear list,

the following three lines allow one to count overlaps of aligned 
short-reads with annotations:

aln <- readGappedAlignments("somebamfile.bam")
txdb <- makeTranscriptFromUCSC(genome="hg19", tablename="ensGene")
ensGenes <- exonsBy(txdb, by="gene")
ov <- countGenomicOverlaps(aln, ensGenes)

then i want to get read-counts per gene and the first thing that comes 
to my head is doing:

counts <- sapply(ov, function(x) sum(values(x)[["hits"]]))

which goes through every gene and adds up the "hits" of its exons. 
however, this latter step of "just adding" takes longer than the actual 
calculation of the hits with countGenomicOverlaps() and i guess that 
there are more efficient ways to approach this, probably something 
around "reducing the hits value column". i've been looking at rdapply() 
and reduce() and googled too, but couldn't find anything, so i look 
forward to your suggestions.

thanks!!
robert.