[mythtv-users] Backend Watchdog??

Kenan Ezal sbmythtv at cox.net
Tue Jan 23 23:22:58 UTC 2007


---- Dave Ansell <dave at theansells.com> wrote: 
> 
> ----- Original Message ----- 
> From: "Kenan Ezal" <sbmythtv at cox.net>
> To: <mythtv-users at mythtv.org>
> Sent: Tuesday, January 23, 2007 5:47 PM
> Subject: Re: [mythtv-users] Backend Watchdog??
> 
> 
> <<    My only issue is that the backend service occasionally dies for no
> aparent reason.  This has been the case in every incarnation to date,
> whatever I try.   It doesnt happen often, but enought to be annoying and
> reduce WAF etc. >>
> 
> I was having a similar problem (although much more frequently) until last 
> weekend when I discovered the file system I was using for my recordings 
> (XFS) was not stable with my hardware. I switched to ext3 and everything 
> works great now. See:
> 
> http://www.extremetech.com/article2/0,1697,2055105,00.asp
> 
> Hope it helps.
> 
> -Kenan
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> 
> 
> 
> Interesting.    I am using XFS for the video partition and ext3 for OS and 
> database.   This seems in line with the recommendations unless I have missed 
> something. 
> 
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It depends... Jarod also says:

"both XFS and JFS are known to lead to stack overflows and system stability problems on some systems if a combination of software RAID, LVM, and XFS or JFS are stacked one on top of the other"

Although I'm using Fedora, Gentoo.org states:

http://www.gentoo.org/doc/en/handbook/handbook-hppa.xml?part=1&chap=4

"XFS is a filesystem with metadata journaling which comes with a robust feature-set and is optimized for scalability. We only recommend using this filesystem on Linux systems with high-end SCSI and/or fibre channel storage and an uninterruptible power supply. Because XFS aggressively caches in-transit data in RAM, improperly designed programs (those that don't take proper precautions when writing files to disk and there are quite a few of them) can lose a good deal of data if the system goes down unexpectedly."

In my case I was using LVM+XFS across two PATA drives with one of them a bit older and less capable.

The change from XFS to ext3 was relatively simple once I backed up my data (just see Jarod's article). I had to be a little careful since I'm using a logical volume and not a simple partition, but it was an umount, a mkfs, and a mount. Then copy your data back. If it weren't for all the backing up and copying of data, it was a two minute operation that caused me two months of headaches, but I'm feeling much better now ;-)

-Kenan





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