[mythtv-users] Mythbackend randomly dies

Ismo Tanskanen ismot at telemail.fi
Mon Aug 11 06:18:11 UTC 2008


I've had a script to restart mythbackend if it died almost since I
started to use mythtv...
It used to crash several times a day. Now it happens about twice a
week at the most.

I've stopped trying to find out why it crashes ; I just restart it 
automatically

2008/8/11 Bobby Gill <bobbygill>:
>  Here's the output: http://pastebin.ca/1165611 Sorry for putting to
>  pastebin, don't want a novel of an email for folks if that's not cool.
>
>  It's been happening for some time now, I don't know enough to be able to
>  grasp all the output of the log.
>
>  Thanks for any help,
>  Bob
>
>  _______________________________________________
>  mythtv-users mailing list
>  mythtv-users
>  http://mythtv.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/mythtv-users
>
>
_______________________________________________
mythtv-users mailing list
mythtv-users
http://mythtv.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/mythtv-users

This has been a some kind of puzzle for me. Mythbackend could die so 
many ways, that I had to put together four different ways to keep it 
running.

Happily, after moving to .21 fixes, crashing has reduced a lot. It still 
does it time to time, maybe once a week average.

I have not find a real reason for crashing. Maybe it is caused by my 
operating system (fedora core 5), maybe it is hardware problem. But my 
OS newer crashes, and memory tests etc run fine. So I just live with it.

Here are my "crashing variations"

- It just dies without warning. This is easy to monitor with monit or 
similar monitoring program. I use monit.

- It is there, but does not respond to mythweb or frontend calls. Or 
responds veeery slow.. this is more difficult. I have a script what 
polls web port, and if mythbackend does not respond in specified time, 
it restarts it. Monit's http monitoring does not work correctly, as it 
causes mythbackend crashes itself for some reason.

- Works, but slowly and cpu usage is 100%. This is happily easy to 
monitor with latest monit beta. Don't use older monit, as it does not 
handle child processes as separate. So, using commflag or transcode from 
user job causes monit to think that mythbackend uses too much cpu.

- Everything works, but can't open dvb card correctly. Records only 0bit 
files. This was difficult to monitor. Luckily mythbackend wrotes to 
mythbackend.log a message "Multiplex is not available". I use a script 
what reads log and if there is this message, it restarts mythbackend.

-Kane


More information about the mythtv-users mailing list