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Hard Disk Working Overtime, Working Overtime for no reason
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Author:  Ravenium [ Tue Feb 26, 2008 7:11 pm ]
Post subject:  Hard Disk Working Overtime, Working Overtime for no reason
With apologies to BTO, of course, my hard disk, after about 2-3 upgrades, seems to be having more and more trouble "taking care of business". I don't think the disk is dying (repeated fscks and other tests have come back negative).

I hate posting hardware problems with vague symptoms, but see if this makes sense to anyone...

I can perform normal MythTV operations - watch shows, change channels, record shows - everything seems to be happening normally. However, two things appear to be taking an inordinate amount of time:

1. Deleting shows: It happens right away, but the disk grinds away for up to 10-20 seconds and locks up the system during said process. I've chalked this up to XFS (which I hear has a few file delete performance issues) on the /myth partition.

2. Going from ANY sub-menu to the main menu causes the disk to grind and grind away for no apparently reason for anywhere 30-60 seconds. For example, let's say I've been browsing recordings and have decided to watch live tv. I go up from recordings to the main menu....BAM, the hard disk light goes on solid and grinds away for up to 60 seconds.

During this time I can of course select live tv, but it will merely make the screen black for that time, then boot me to the main menu. If I wait for the disk to quit grinding, I can then select live tv and it works fine.


Any thoughts? It's an Athlon XP with 1 gig of ram (so I hope it's not swapping much) and a regular old 7200 RPM 160 gig IDE drive. Standard Definition, nothing fancy.
Author:  mihanson [ Tue Feb 26, 2008 7:26 pm ]
Post subject: 
What version of KnoppMyth are you using? (If you're not using KnoppMyth, what version of mythtv are you running?) In recent versions of mythtv there is an option to "delete files slowly" which may help you file deletion problems.
Author:  Ravenium [ Tue Feb 26, 2008 7:34 pm ]
Post subject: 
R5F27, sorry about that - I shoulda said "latest".

The deletion doesn't bother me too much as it's usually not too bad and I only delete a couple shows per week.

The main menu one is what puzzles me - I think I might have the screen display size too large (which means the integrated video card has to chug to keep up as it's one of those crappy shared-ram nvidia jobs on a Shuttle SN41G2).

I have VGA running to my TV and I believe the resolution is 1600x1200. The TV has a vga in, it's a Samsung 50 inch 1080p capable DLP. I really should toss my current pc and buy an HDTV tuner card, but I don't watch enough HD programming to make it worth my while yet.
Author:  slowtolearn [ Tue Feb 26, 2008 8:12 pm ]
Post subject: 
Ravenium wrote:
R5F27, sorry about that - I shoulda said "latest".

The deletion doesn't bother me too much as it's usually not too bad and I only delete a couple shows per week.

The main menu one is what puzzles me - I think I might have the screen display size too large (which means the integrated video card has to chug to keep up as it's one of those crappy shared-ram nvidia jobs on a Shuttle SN41G2).

I have VGA running to my TV and I believe the resolution is 1600x1200. The TV has a vga in, it's a Samsung 50 inch 1080p capable DLP. I really should toss my current pc and buy an HDTV tuner card, but I don't watch enough HD programming to make it worth my while yet.
I have seen posts on these forums (but for the life of me I can't find any of them now) indicating that running too high a resolution with too little video "ooomph" can cause slowdowns in navigation within MythTV - Maybe you could try something in the 1024x768 range to see if that helps?
Author:  marc.aronson [ Tue Feb 26, 2008 8:33 pm ]
Post subject: 
It's a long shot, but you might want to try repairing and optimizing your mysql database -- see the database optimization section of this article: http://www.knoppmythwiki.org/index.php? ... imizeHowTo

My experience with xfs is that it is very efficient at deleting files.

Update: You can also try dropping your video resolution to see if that helps with performance. Your set will probably support lower resolutions through the VGA port.

Marc
Author:  Ravenium [ Tue Feb 26, 2008 11:03 pm ]
Post subject: 
I reset the resolution to 800x600 and performance greatly improved. I can't help but wonder if since the graphics card shares RAM with the system, it was finding some way to go heavily into swap or some such.

Either way, I cannot see much of a difference between 800x600 and 1600x1200, other than that the guide is a bit larger.

Thanks everyone!
Author:  alien [ Wed Feb 27, 2008 2:17 am ]
Post subject: 
I have noticed that some themes fall over with higher resolutions. This was back when I had 256M, but the memory usage was so great I think it would have crippled a 1G machine.

The solution was to either lower the resolution (as you did) or find a better theme (as I did). I've found MythCenter and MythCenter-wide work well.

Cheers,

Allen
Author:  Liv2Cod [ Wed Feb 27, 2008 12:04 pm ]
Post subject: 
My guess is swapping. The signature is the coffee-grinder disk drive behavior when you try to invoke something that causes a module to load. Check your swap partition and see if it's using any swap. If it is, you might be able to just add some RAM. Cheap at today's prices!
Author:  datobin1 [ Wed Feb 27, 2008 1:57 pm ]
Post subject: 
you may also want to check in the BIOS for a setting that controls how much of the ram is used for video. If you bump it up it may help.
Author:  mihanson [ Wed Feb 27, 2008 2:46 pm ]
Post subject:  Re: Hard Disk Working Overtime, Working Overtime for no reas
Ravenium wrote:
1. Deleting shows: It happens right away, but the disk grinds away for up to 10-20 seconds and locks up the system during said process. I've chalked this up to XFS (which I hear has a few file delete performance issues) on the /myth partition.


You can also check to see how fragmented your XFS partition is. This command will tell you:
Code:
mythbox-mbe:~# xfs_db -r /dev/md0
xfs_db> frag


It will output something like this:
Code:
actual 18340, ideal 14733, fragmentation factor 19.67%


Replace /dev/md0 with your /myth partition.
Author:  grante [ Wed Feb 27, 2008 2:58 pm ]
Post subject:  Re: Hard Disk Working Overtime, Working Overtime for no reas
Quote:
Deleting shows: It happens right away, but the disk grinds
away for up to 10-20 seconds and locks up the system during
said process. I've chalked this up to XFS (which I hear has a
few file delete performance issues) on the /myth partition.

FWIW, I often (though not always) see the same thing using
ext3. Sometimes it's so bad that it will exit playback mode as
if the EOF had been reached and ask me if I want to delete the
recording. If I wait for the disk churning to stop, I can
watch the aborted program with no problems.

I've checked my RAM usage, and on average 50-70% is being used
for buffer cache, so more RAM obviously isn't the answer.

I tried optimizing MySQL tables, and that didn't make any
difference. Deleting a bunch of recordings to get the
partition usage down below 50% didn't make any difference
either.
Quote:
During this time I can of course select live tv, but it will
merely make the screen black for that time, then boot me to the
main menu. If I wait for the disk to quit grinding, I can then
select live tv and it works fine.

In the past when I've asked about this problem, the standard
answer I got was to switch from ext3 to XFS. I haven't done
that yet, but Apparently that's not a solution. :/
Author:  Liv2Cod [ Wed Feb 27, 2008 6:23 pm ]
Post subject: 
XFS is probably not your problem. I use XFS on two 750G drives, one for hdtv and one for movies. Deletes are instant, even for 130G football game programs in HD. Maybe there's something wrong with the disk (too many remapped sectors) or something.
Author:  marc.aronson [ Thu Feb 28, 2008 12:28 am ]
Post subject:  Re: Hard Disk Working Overtime, Working Overtime for no reas
mihanson wrote:
You can also check to see how fragmented your XFS partition is. This command will tell you:
Code:
mythbox-mbe:~# xfs_db -r /dev/md0
xfs_db> frag


I ran this on my xfs file system and the output is actual 65991, ideal 22104, fragmentation factor 66.50%, so it looks like I need to defrag. How do you defarg an XFS file system under knoppmyth R5F27? Thanks!
Author:  slowtolearn [ Thu Feb 28, 2008 8:32 am ]
Post subject:  Re: Hard Disk Working Overtime, Working Overtime for no reas
Hi Marc,

marc.aronson wrote:
mihanson wrote:
You can also check to see how fragmented your XFS partition is. This command will tell you:
Code:
mythbox-mbe:~# xfs_db -r /dev/md0
xfs_db> frag


I ran this on my xfs file system and the output is actual 65991, ideal 22104, fragmentation factor 66.50%, so it looks like I need to defrag. How do you defarg an XFS file system under knoppmyth R5F27? Thanks!
Use xfs_fsr, part of the xfsdump utilities.
Author:  marc.aronson [ Fri Feb 29, 2008 1:12 am ]
Post subject:  Re: Hard Disk Working Overtime, Working Overtime for no reas
slowtolearn wrote:
Hi Marc,
Use xfs_fsr, part of the xfsdump utilities.

Thanks for the info. Looks like xfsdump isn't pre-install in R5F27 -- how do I install it and do you invoke xfs_fsr with any special options? Thanks!

Marc
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