[mythtv-users] Commercial flagging hanging at 99%?

[brian]

Nate Carlson wrote:
> On Wed, 30 May 2007, Vincent Jorrand wrote:
>> I sometimes see that when I delete a recording while commflag is running 
>> on it. I got in the habit of not not deleting a recording if 
>> commflagging is currently running for it. I know that's just a 
>> workaround, not a solution ...
> 
> Unfortunately, these are programs that haven't been deleted..  :/

   I've seen something similar here.  At first, I thought it was mythbackend acting up (because, ultimately, nothing can talk to 
mythbackend, and boxes start popping up in mythwelcome asking if I have a backend running, and the frontend cannot find any 
recordings, etc..).  This situation is difficult to pin down, because it doesn't happen *all* the time... only occasionally.

   It happened this weekend.  Just at the top of the hour, when one recording was ending and another starting (on the same tuner, I 
was recording Law & Order from TNT).  What I suspect happened is that the mythcommflag process was 'hanging around' from having 
processed the previous hour's show, and when this hour's recording ended and was about to be queued for commflagging and next hour's 
show was about to start recording, the 'idle' commflag process kicked into high gear at 99% CPU, and everything went south from 
there.  I had coincidentally happened to run `top` via ssh only moments before this started, and the machine was 98.4% idle; a 
moment later (right at the top of the hour, in fact) a mythcommflag process was at the top of `top`, using 99% CPU.  Mythfrontend 
was unresponsive, and after I ran `pkill mythfrontend` via ssh, mythwelcome complained that it couldn't find a mythbackend process 
(yes, it was running, and mythbackend was recording the current L&O episode on TNT).  Eventually (several more seconds later), I 
ended up having to shutdown/restart the machine to get things going again.

   I'm trying to come up with a reproducible scenario for this problem so that I can submit a coherent bug report.  I suspect you 
and I are seeing the same evasive problem in mythcommflag, perhaps arriving at it from different directions.  ...if you can come up 
with a scenario that reproduces the problem, I can determine if the same steps produce the problem here -- and we can get a bug 
filed and hopefully get a fix.   Please feel free to cc: me on any futher developments you discover regarding this issue...  in 
0.18.1 and 0.19 days, my MythTV box could run for days and days on end (into the 3 digit days on `uptime`).  At present (running 
0.20 SVN [current]), it rarely makes it into two digit days before I have to `shutdown -h now` or hit the big red button to 
continue...  :/

  - Brian