I wonder if this isn't what the "Delete files slowly" option in mythtv-setup (2nd General page) is supposed to accomplish? I haven't used it myself...

Ok, I may be on my own thread here but, I just did a little playing with top and renice and noticed that in my particular situation that commercial flagging seemed to be eating up too many cpu cycles so I set the niceness to 19 (the nicest process it can be) and wa la. No more pauses in playback. I know that somewhere there is a setting to delay commercial flagging or something. I will have to track it down.

_________________
P4 1.6 GHz
1.2 GB RAM
Nvidia GeForce4 MX 4000
Hauppage PVR 500 MCE
Soundblaster Live
ATI Remote Wonder II

Update on my situation:
With Leno recording and playing back, I opened an x-term window on top of Leno, and deleted an old recording manually. 8GB or so. It stalled the playback 3 times over a period of about 10 seconds. So it's not MySQL related, just disk I/O.
I haven't found the "delete slowly" option, but it sounds interesting. I looked on the "general" pages of the backend setup. I'm on R5D1, in case it's a new feature of MythTV 0.20.

You know, the file system type can have a huge effect on the time it takes to delete a file. XFS deletes a file almost instantly without much CPU overhead while EXT3 and others take a definite hit when large files are deleted. Since I do everything in HD, I switched to XFS a long time ago for this reason. Maybe it's a factor on your box?

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The slow delete option is under general settings when you run mythtv-setup from a shell window.

_________________
P4 1.6 GHz
1.2 GB RAM
Nvidia GeForce4 MX 4000
Hauppage PVR 500 MCE
Soundblaster Live
ATI Remote Wonder II

I don't think my hard drive is the cause of my pauses:



The thread i posted earlier makes me think that each time the eit scanner runs it has to scan through and update the recording schedule. That means lots of mysql access and lots of cpu usage. How would I re-nice that? would I have to do mysql and mythbackend?

Bingo, I think! I had XFS originally, but I lost a drive in Oct and had to re-build from scratch. I followed the LVM write-up, but don't think I ever made the conversion to XFS. Dang! Thanks for that.

I saw this mentioned in an MythTV howto, but I have to admit I really know very little about XFS.

Obviously, there sounds like a nice benefit, but are there any disadvantages for XFS compared to ext3?

Never mind, just answered my own question.


http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/XFS


The links to IBM articles were rather informative.

I was thinking about reloading my setup with the next KM. I'll probably do that and use XFS, then.

Thanks for the info, guys!

_________________
R5.5
p4/3.0 GHz
2GB PC3200
Abit IC7-G
3x Seagate 7200.10 SATA (raid1 /, raid5 /myth)
eVGA FX-5500 AGP
3x PVR-150 (model 1045)
MCEUSB2 remote w/Philips USB transceiver

When you guys "reload" your systems, do you just blow away all your saved programs? I have a boatload of stuff for the kids and movies off HBO I don't want to lose if I ever upgrade. Comments?

Thanks,

Abs

I think there's a way to keep that stuff, even after a reformat.

Obviously you have to back it up to another system first, but there is a utility I saw mentioned here that will reinsert shows into the system once you've restored the files.

Or you can just backup the mysql database as well as the shows before you reinstall. Obviously you don't want to do an upgrade or switch versions and then copy back the mysql database, as that could break the system.

Another option you might consider is to burn your saved shows to dvd. Anything you want to keep, move to dvd. Then you can reformat without worrying. Once complete, you can have the system reload the shows as videos.

I believe the .20 version of mythtv also lets you archive shows even easier.

The easiest way is to start with a new clean drive. After formatting the new drive with whatever filesystem you want, just copy the /myth partition to the new drive. Pretty much every time I've upgraded my system, it has involved either adding drives or switching to a new, larger drive.

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FYI, I had no problem running R5B1 on a 2600+, 512MB RAM, Nvidia 5200 w/XvMC, recompiled kernel for K7. This didn't swap and CPU usage while watching HDTV was around 60%.

Now, this same system upgraded from scratch to R5E50 is swapping, CPU is 70%-90% with some 100% and video is choppy.

I had thought this was going to rock since I found that a BIOS config problem was disabling DDR memory so I figured the R5E50 was going to scream. But something is hogging memory or something else is forcing more beefy system components.

BTW, The web remote is nice and the streaming interface might be interesting.

Interesting...

I guess that the new setup with MythTV 0.20 is just more CPU-intensive.

I took my system and replaced the 320 GB UDMA drive with a new 7200.10 Seagate SATA, then performed a custom install and formatted /myth as XFS.

File access appears much improved--wow, stuff deletes with a blink or two of the HD light, compared to ext3.

However, heavy I/O times still bog the box down. Two particular ones:

1) mythfilldatabase

2) Commercial flagging. This has been proven that the "nice" level was set incorrectly in the code somewhere, I think, and it's not easily fixable. I've actually just stopped commercial flagging altogether for the time being.

Otherwise this box is great!

_________________
R5.5
p4/3.0 GHz
2GB PC3200
Abit IC7-G
3x Seagate 7200.10 SATA (raid1 /, raid5 /myth)
eVGA FX-5500 AGP
3x PVR-150 (model 1045)
MCEUSB2 remote w/Philips USB transceiver

I have the same pause problem on my box (2 year old p4 box at 2.6 iirc, w. 256mb ram) that ran fine using an older install of knoppmyth. The hard drive is formatted with ext3, so that may be the problem as well. The only recordings that I am playing though are just from the pvr 150 at 720x480. Any suggestions?

edit: videos will play fine 85% of the time on xbmc streaming through samba, although it will occassionaly just exit to the file menu, causing me to have to restart it (not sure if this is a hard drive delay, or a bug in xbmc) but no pauses happen while playing.

I have had some success reducing the pausing by uninstalling folding at home, changing the niceness of commercial flagging, going into mythtv-setup and reducing the number of jobs to 1, and reducing the video bit rate in the recording profiles. Reducing the bit rate does decrease the picture quality of course but, it also decreases the file size of the recordings which in turn reduces the amount of disc access needed. I still get some pausing here and their but, It has improved a lot compared to the default installation.

_________________
P4 1.6 GHz
1.2 GB RAM
Nvidia GeForce4 MX 4000
Hauppage PVR 500 MCE
Soundblaster Live
ATI Remote Wonder II