[mythtv-users] Frontend freeze when deleting recording

[chris at cpr.homelinux.net]

On Sun, Oct 23, 2005 at 10:34:33AM -0500, Mercury Morris wrote:
> My guess is that there are quite few MythTV folks that are not aware of the
> "delete-a-recording-while-recording" I/O bottleneck.  They, and I, will be most
> interested in the results you might observe regarding filesystem stability and
> how fast XFS can delete a recording concurrent with recording a program.

I converted my system to XFS on (software) RAID-5 when I 
installed MythTV and it's been rock-solid.  The box also 
hosts IMAP, SMB, VNC and Apache2 servers, and has never 
seemed to have any problem deleting large files while 
recording.  Both mythweb and the remote front-end seem to 
come back almost instantly even when deleting files in the 
6-8 Gb range.

The documentation on www.mythtv.org is inconsistent: 
Section 3 (prerequisites) says that delete speed is 
important and reccommends XFS or JFS, but then Section 23 
(partition formatting) says ext3 is OK as long as you don't 
use the largefile4 option and warns that JFS might take up 
too much CPU.  I figure it's a lose-lose decision -- if 
your system is too slow to handle JFS with a framegrabber 
then it probably won't handle an ext3 delete either.

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