[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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