[mythtv-users] Freevo, Tivo & MythTV

[Marco Nelissen]

>On Nov 18, 2006, at 6:13 PM, Marco Nelissen wrote:
>
>>> Marco Nelissen wrote:
>>>> You're lucky then. I have to wait anywhere from 6 to 17 seconds  
>>>> to go to
>>>> live TV, and channel changing is about 6 seconds on a good day.
>>>
>>> I see the long delay when I start live TV mode, but from then on  
>>> channel
>>> changes are only a few seconds.  Certainly not six.  I suspect the  
>>> long
>>> delay on switching to live TV is because I don't have enough RAM  
>>> and the
>>> system is swapping when I change from one function to another, but I
>>> haven't bought another stick of RAM to verify this, yet.  With  
>>> only 256
>>> megabytes of RAM and both the frontend and backend running I use a
>>> significant amount of swap.
>>
>> I have 512MB and it's a combined front/back end. I read that mythtv
>> requires 256MB, so I figured I'd double that and be extra-safe. Would
>> adding more memory help in any way with channel-change speed?
>
>Check your swap usage to see how much is being used while viewing  
>Live TV. That will tell you if you need more RAM.

I don't think it's quite that straightforward on linux, unless you
completely disable swap (generally a bad idea). Linux tends to swap
out unused code and data and use the freed up RAM for disk-buffers, IIRC.
Right now it's showing 240MB of swap in use, but also 240MB of free RAM.