Hello, everyone...

(this post deals with stability problems I mentioned in a previous thread, but seeing as the topic has shifted, I'm starting a new one; hope that's OK)

As I've mentioned before, I've been having some serious system stability problems (other than than my MythBox works great!). It locks up at seemingly random times. It's not an IVTV issue, and my logs don't have anything I would consider unusual in them.

Here's what I have:

Standard definition only
IBM NetVista (Intel chipset)
P4 1.8GHz
256MB of RAM
Hauppauge PVR-150
GeForce FX 5200 PCI graphics card (128MB RAM)
40G & 80G hard drives (80G mounted as /myth/tv/)
KnoppMyth R5E50
Onboard sound

It was suggested that I might not have enough RAM, but rrdtool isn't showing that I run out at any time (although it does come close), and I always have plenty of swap space.

So my question is this: What are KnoppMyth/MythTV's RAM requirements for a system like this? I'd heard that for SD, RAM wasn't a big factor, and that 256 would be enough. Is this incorrect?

Any assistance would be appreciated. I'm kind of at a loss as to what the problem could be...

- Sean

I've been running with 256M and no problems. Linux normally uses almost all available RAM. If you have lot's of swap, then things are okay.

Running out of RAM/Swap usually has some very obvious symptoms. Do to a bug in linux that appeared when I first installed the E series, if I set my video resolution at 1024x768, mythfrontend will start to eat RAM/Swap.

Basically what happens is the menus slow down and there is almost no response, HD activity becomes continuous. Eventually (5-10 mins), the box reboots. In one of the log files (I think syslog) the last message is something like "cannot allocate shared memory".

This type of uncontrolled memory usage would bring down a system no matter how much RAM was available. But it gives you an idea what running out of RAM/Swap would do.

Basically if things are running without too many slowdowns or too much unusual disk activity, your RAM is okay.

_________________
ASUS AT3N7A-I (Atom 330)
TBS 8922 PCI (DVB-S2)

Heat? Definitely on my top-five list of things that produce "oddities" in a computer. Do you have mbmon or lmsensors running on your system?

Faulty/failing PSU is another one of those things that isn't obvious at first...

256M should be enough memory, but the recommendations tend to be 512M for SDTV and 1Gb for HDTV. Memory is relatively cheap, and you really don't want to be swapping in the middle of a realtime operation like recording or playing back video.

I agree with the above guys- more memory is in order, & it's relatively cheap.
I run a Netvista with a 1 ghz processor, and it's completely adequate for NTSC TV (your 1.8 could swing two cards no sweat- I run one like that too..) ...but I have a half-gig of memory needed or not....
As noted swap will run your hard drive & risk pauses or stutters that could be avoided if the machine never swaps...
I also run an HD (3.2 ghz) machine with a gig of memory, and it runs inside 512 and never uses swap.