[mythtv-users] Long term stability?

[Dave Sherohman]

On Tue, Nov 08, 2005 at 05:49:48PM -0600, Greg Mitchell wrote:
> >Does anyone have a backend that runs for a week or more under reasonably
> >heavy use?  By run, I mean with no manual intervention or cron jobs
> >resetting things/etc.  I still have to occasionally do
> >a /etc/init.d/mythbackend restart although I'm not quite sure why...
> 
> My uptime was around 81 days until I had to reboot because something 
> went wrong with ivtv and it wasn't recording anymore.

Everyone seems to be posting uptime stats, but I don't really see them
as relevant to the original question.  He asked whether people have been
able to keep myth running "with no... cron jobs" and mentions that he
has to "occasionally do a /etc/init.d/mythbackend restart".  Cron jobs
and running restarts out of init.d only work on systems that are up
and running, so it seems clear that he's *not* asking about hardware
or system stability, but rather the mythbackend daemon specifically.
If your mythbackend started when you booted the system and has been
running continuously without having to be restarted since then, please
say so.  If it hasn't, then your uptime is irrelevant to the question.

As for myself, my frontend/backend combined system currently has an uptime
of 35 day(s), 11:45:18, with the last downtime caused by a power outage.
However, I usually have to restart mythbackend once or twice a week after
it decides to stop talking to the database (it continues to run, but any
function which requires access to the database hangs and eventually times
out, plus any recording in progress immediately stops).  These problems
appear to be caused by programs being deleted (either manual deletion or
the deletion of the original MPEG2 .nuv when transcoding is complete)
while another database update is in progress, although I haven't tried
too hard to verify this.  I suspect that's the sort of situation (and
the type of stability) that the original poster was asking about.

And if anyone knows a good way to detect automatically when this happens
so that I can set up a cron job to notice it and restart mythbackend,
I'd love to hear about it...

-- 
The freedoms that we enjoy presently are the most important victories of the
White Hats over the past several millennia, and it is vitally important that
we don't give them up now, only because we are frightened.
  - Eolake Stobblehouse (http://stobblehouse.com/text/battle.html)