[mythtv-users] Weird behavior with top

[Matt Vollmar]

Hi all,

I've been running Myth for a month or so, now and I have had problems 
with performance with my Celeron 2.4.  This was discussed in a previous 
thread.  Well, I have kinda resigned myself to no LiveTV and killing 
recordings when I want to watch a recording at the same time.  I feel 
bad about this resignation, but I didn't receive conclusive responses 
from the list about this.  Some said I was seeing the performance I 
should see, some were saying I should get much better performance.  I've 
seen some comment about their machines doing much greater things than 
mine seems to be able to do.  ANYWAY.

On my box, for some really odd reason, when Myth is the one taking the 
CPU (front or backend), top does not show the top running process.  This 
seems really strange.  If I sort by CPU, nothing comes to the top that 
is above 5%!  I thought maybe this was some weird glitch with top, but 
then I was just gzip'ing a large file and gzip was taking 45% of the 
CPU.  I thought, "That's odd."  I checked and sure enough, Myth was 
recording something.  I stopped the recording and suddenly gzip was 
taking 95% of the CPU.  Is this normal behavior that all of you see on 
your boxen?  I am starting to wonder if I am missing some critical 
multi-threading library or something.  Or, my box could be 
demon-possessed and need an exorcism.  Who knows???

I am fully committed to Myth now, as I just got the full WAF when my 
wife watched something like 6 of her favorite HGTV/Food Network shows 
without commercials and zero assistance.  I even heard her brag to her 
sister on the phone about it!

Matt