[mythtv-users] Moving through "Watch Recordings" slow?

[Jonathan Rogers]

On Thu, 2006-12-14 at 09:26 -0500, Ryan Duffy wrote:
> 
> > this is slow all the time, its like 2.5 to 3.0 seconds each time I
> > move up and down.
> 
> Mine is slow (about 2-3 seconds) but only after watching a recording then exiting back to the recordings list. If I back out one more menu level, and move back into the recordings list, it is very quick to move between recordings again.

I have almost exactly the same problem that Ryan Duffy describes. When
mythfrontend first starts up, it is responsive to input from keyboard
and lirc remote. After playing a recording (which has no significant
performance problems), moving through the recordings list is much
slower. Going back to the top level menu, then back to the recordings
list doesn't always fix the problem, though restarting mythfrontend
always does. Navigating to certain other menus, such as system status,
seems to reset mythfrontend to its responsive state.

I have been seeing this problem starting with 0.19, then on 0.20, and
now on SVN from a few days ago. I have thought it could be CPU load,
video driver, or permissions related, but I believe I've eliminated all
those possibilities. This problem seems unrelated to what else is
happening on the system. The CPU is an Athlon64 x2 3800, which has no
trouble playing back HD recordings. The video card is a Radeon 9600 with
Xorg's radeon driver, which handles video playback fine. There are two
drives, one WDC SATA drive and one Seagate UATA-100 drive, set as master
by itself.

There is one filesystem for recordings on each disk (using the new
storage groups feature), and both frontend and backend users can read
and write to both locations. The Seagate drive spins down most of the
time, since it only contains recordings. There is an additional delay
while it spins up, but I was already aware of this and it's unrelated to
my ongoing problem. I tried removing all the PNG thumbnails. Recreating
them introduced additional delays, but after that was done, the problem
I'm trying to fix is still there.

Based on my observations, I think it has to be a problem within
mythfrontend, since it seems to only depend on its internal state. I'm
wondering if it could have something to do with mythfrontend's MySQL
connections. Or, perhaps it's somehow related to running on an SMP
system. I also have a separate MythTV system with only a Duron 800, one
UATA hard drive, and a PVR-350 for output. It's running 0.20. Though it
has much lower overall performance, it doesn't have the slow recordings
menu problem and generally performs quite well for an SD Mythbox.

Jonathan Rogers