[mythtv-users] A few 0.19 and RAM questions

[Mark Hetherington]

On Sun, 5 Feb 2006 03:23 pm, Yeechang Lee wrote:
> Like all other 0.18.1 users on the list I am eagerly looking forward
> to 0.19 (specifically, the ATrpms version). A few questions in
> advance:
>
> c) What does MythTV use additional RAM for, if anything? I have 512MB
>    on my frontend/backend that is solely dedicated to MythTV. Despite
>    my best efforts at cutting back on extraneous applications and
>    daemons, including switching from full-blown KDE to ratpoison and
>    from xterm to rxvt, the system consistently uses 150-300MB of swap
>    according to 'free -m'. If I were to upgrade to 2GB of RAM, would
>    mythbackend automatically use the extra RAM to, say, buffer
>    recordings so as to minimize the IOBOUND errors I mention in b)? Or
>    would upgrading to 1GB, thus theoretically eliminating the need for
>    any swap, be sufficient?

I'm not an expert on this, so this is mostly a matter of what I believe to be 
true, but perhaps is not particularly accurate.
I think no matter how much RAM you have, linux will still use some swap. I 
think it's partly so it can have stuff already swapped out, even if it is in 
RAM as well, so it doesn't take as long to swap when needed. I'm fairly 
certain 512Mb is sufficient unless your looking at multiple encoders.