I think I have figured out how to replicate this problem, but not really what causes it. I have 6.03 on my mythbox and I noticed that the nights when I have multiple recordings going, I will have the playback lockup briefly at one point, then return to normal about 10-30 seconds later.

I started investigating and noticed that the swap jumps at the same time. The swap usage may be 0% prior to that on my rrd graphs, but at roughly the time I get the glitch in playback it will jump to 15-20% (Swap size is 1 GB). So I figured it had something to do with it suddenly swapping a lot. I tried adjusting the swappiness up and down to no avail.

Just last week I think I finally narrowed it down to the following. When I have multiple shows recording at the same time, I will watch one as it's recording (30 min), and at the end of the show I will exit to the menu and start the 2nd one (60 min) as it is still recording. Well, I will now be about 30 minutes behind the live data on the 2nd recording (ignoring fast forwarding through commercials, etc.) When it finishes recording I am still watching with 15 minutes or so remaining... This is when the video hesitates.

In the mythfrontend.log there is an entry about switching from watchingrecorded to watchingprerecorded. This is when it seems to swap all of this data. It has always been with HD shows, but I have not tried it with SD. Any ideas on how to prevent this (besides the obvious "don't watch it as it's recording")? I have not been able to find any information online.

I originally posted a snippet of the mythfrontend.log here, but thought I should start a new thread:
http://knoppmyth.net/phpBB2/viewtopic.p ... 732#130732

Well, I upped my RAM to 1.5 GB from 1 GB and changed my swappiness value to 80 from 60. So far so good. Last night I was watching an HD recording with about 5-10 minutes left to play when the recording ended and there was not even a stutter. Maybe myth .23 is just more memory hungry than earlier revisions...

Sounds like you have "solved" the problem. Just thought I'd mention that your display resolution (ie. 720p vs. 1080i) and the theme that you are using will make a HUGE impact on memory usage since all of the theme images are rendered to your screen resolution and stored in RAM (assuming enough RAM is available) to prevent the menus from lagging.

Example: If you run a high resolution theme on a box with only 512 MB of RAM after navigation through the menus for a while you will eventually use all the available RAM and menu images will start being written to swap space. At this point menu navigation will slow to a crawl and you will want to throw your remote at the TV.

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ABIT NF-M2 nView | Athlon 64 X2 3800+ | 2GB DDR2 800 | HDHomerun | GeForce 6150 (onboard) | WD 640 GB SATA HD | DVD-RW (sata) | StreamZap IR receiver with Logitech Harmony remote

Vizio 37" LCD HDTV (1080p)

Thanks for the comments Martian. I'm not real privy on all of the themes, but here is kind of a brief history of my setup.

R5.5->R6.01 upgrade, combined frontend/backend, blootube widescreen theme, 1080p resolution, intermittent (weekly?) hard lockups before and after, 1 GB Ram. Biggest nuisance was frontend becoming nonresponsive when using the guide when watching a 720p channel (1080i and SD were fine).

R6.01->R6.03 upgrade, same theme, reduced resolution to 720p, still had lockups. Added external video card, which has cleared the lockups. Began having the problem stated in earlier posts. Guide still sometimes becomes unresponsive (frequently with 720p channels, but occasionally now with 1080i as well). Upgraded RAM just this week and it has hopefully resolved the "end of recording" problem.

What themes would you recommend? I had seen a thread somewhere that some of the themes are basically deprecated with myth .23. Normally my navigation does not slow down, it just completely stalls in the guide as described above (like no response after 5-10 minutes).

I have a sneaking suspicion that something got broken at some point and through the process of upgrading it has had somewhat of a domino effect. But with the tweaks I've done to fix glitches here and there I am being a sissy about doing a fresh install.

I had the same problem with blootube widescreen when I have only 1 GB of RAM. The image are so high res in that them it takes a minimum of 1.5 GB in order to avoid swapping. I haven't had any issues since upgrading to 2 GB RAM.

I'm now using one of the 0.23 themes which includes all the new features. (Can't remember which one at the moment)

Martian

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ABIT NF-M2 nView | Athlon 64 X2 3800+ | 2GB DDR2 800 | HDHomerun | GeForce 6150 (onboard) | WD 640 GB SATA HD | DVD-RW (sata) | StreamZap IR receiver with Logitech Harmony remote

Vizio 37" LCD HDTV (1080p)