[mythtv-users] Slave backend keeps crashing

[Nick]

On 28/09/05, Paul V. Gratz <pgratz at gratz1.com> wrote:
> Hi,
>   I recently got a PVR-500mce and put it in my front end machine. It is setup
> with a shared NFS mount from the machine running the master backend.
> Anyways, mostly it works well except that about once every 24 hours or so the
> slave backed seems to crash.  The master keeps going and luckly I still have
> an old winTV GO in there that picks up some of the slack but its getting a
> bit annoying.  I couldn't find anything relevent in the logs so this time I
> ran the backend from the command line and this is what I got on the screen:
>
> 2005
> 2005-09-27 18:31:00.003 Finished recording That '70s Show on channel: 1068
> 2005-09-27 18:31:00.051 Changing from RecordingOnly to None
>
> 2005-09-27 18:39:32.598 Finished, 6 break(s) found.
> 2005-09-27 18:57:48.588 Changing from None to RecordingOnly
> 2005-09-27 18:58:47.832 ChannelBase: Could not find input: Television on card
> when setting channel 69

Does this error only appear when the PVR-500 machine has 'crashed' or
is there a problem with the channel/input setup?

>
> 2005-09-27 18:58:47.937 Changing from None to RecordingOnly
> 2005-09-27 19:00:50.097 Starting Commercial Flagging for "Seinfeld" recorded
> from channel 1002 at Tue Sep 27 18:29:00 2005.
> 2005-09-27 19:00:52.525 New DB connection, total: 1
> 2005-09-27 19:00:52.575 New DB connection, total: 2
>
> 2005-09-27 19:29:56.175 Finished, 2 break(s) found.
> 2005-09-27 19:42:26.867 IOBOUND - blocking in ThreadedFileWriter::Write()
> 2005-09-27 19:42:29.770 IOBOUND - blocking in ThreadedFileWriter::Write()
> 2005-09-27 19:42:36.596 IOBOUND - blocking in ThreadedFileWriter::Write()
> 2005-09-27 19:44:29.603 IOBOUND - blocking in ThreadedFileWriter::Write()
> 2005-09-27 19:44:30.534 IOBOUND - blocking in ThreadedFileWriter::Write()
> 2005-09-27 19:44:30.934 IOBOUND - blocking in ThreadedFileWriter::Write()
> Killed
> livingroom mythrun #
> livingroom mythrun #

Does this error only happen when the backend machine is under heavy
network load, or can it occur when only recording a single stream from
the frontend?

>
> This is with mythtv version .18.1 installed on gentoo machines.
>
> Do you guys have any advice as to what is going on?

Could be network related. I would seriously consider (if convenient)
testing with the PVR card in the backend and then accessing the
recordings from the frontend. There's no reason at all why you
shouldn't be able to have the cards distributed between the 2
machines, but if you are writing and reading across the network
heavily at the same time it might make sense to test by writing
everything locally and then reading from the frontend remotely. Have
you run top whilst the two machines are up to see how the load varies?

You should certainly be able to record two streams (using hardware
encoding/DVB) and playback 1 stream over the network, assuming fast
enough systems (the network hardware itself should be able to support
this).

Nick