[mythtv-users] Dell PowerEdge 2550 1 GHz as dedicated backend/storage..?

Scott Alfter mythtv at salfter.dyndns.org
Mon Nov 19 20:13:59 UTC 2007


matt lutz wrote:
> On 11/19/07, *Andrew Close* <aclose at gmail.com <mailto:aclose at gmail.com>>
> wrote:
>     i've been considering migrating from an all-in-one (FE/BE) solution to
>     a separate FE, BE (and possibly separate DB) solution for a little
>     while now; but i don't have an extra machine to purpose as a dedicated
>     BE.
> 
>     however, i just came across this deal:
> 
>     the PowerEdge is a 1GHz PIII machine, which should be good enough for
>     a BE considering all my capture cards are hardware MPEG.
> 
> I think commflagging and definately transcoding will take *forever* on
> this box.  That's a pretty old box.  In my opinoin, you'd be better off
> buying newer hardware with a much faster CPU.

You could set up your frontend as a slave backend with no tuners.  The master
backend (running on a slower box) could pass off CPU-intensive jobs to the
slave backend.  (For me, commercial flagging would be the main CPU-intensive
job.  Lossless transcoding (the only kind I let MythTV do) is mainly
I/O-intensive and would best be run on the backend.)

I'm working on such a split right now...currently, my master backend is a dual
Athlon MP 2100 and my frontend/slave backend is a Core 2 Duo E6300.  The Athlon
dually sucks down a bit more power than I'd like, though, so I might upgrade
the backend and downgrade the frontend to a pair of Athlon 64 systems I have
hanging around.

(I originally had an Athlon 64 3700 as a combined BE/FE.  Recordings from
various sources (a PVR-500, an A180, and an SA3250HD) frequently had glitches
if the box started getting busy, and the cable box tended to go dead after a
day or two.  The glitches were especially prevalent in HD recordings, but
they'd even turn up in SD recordings from the PVR-500 (especially if both
tuners were in use).  The Core 2 box behaved similarly (but to a somewhat
lesser extent) until I started mostly watching TV from a remote frontend; I
think I went a week with no cable-box dropouts and almost no video glitches.
That's what led me to my current round of experimentation.)

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