[mythtv-users] using ionice on commflagging

JS Boyd mythtv at futures.com
Thu Aug 14 06:10:57 UTC 2008


I use ionice -c 3 on commflagging and transcoding. It does help, but 
there are tradeoffs.

I generally run all transcoding and comflagging via ionice -c 3 which 
gives those processes the lowest priority to the disk drives. However, 
you may find that the processes never finish because they can't get 
enough disk I/O on a busy system. This is something that you definitely 
have to tune to your particular hardware setup.

Even with ionice -c 3, I don't bother trying to commflag  during 
primetime (when the system is recording on up to 4 tuners while a 
recording is being viewed) as that just slows down everything enough 
that WAF points are lost due to skipping during playback issues.

S.

Jerome Yuzyk wrote:
> [First off, thanks very much to those who have responded to other questions 
> I've had. I don't feel right spraying the list with just a Thank You, and a 
> faulty mouse button caused me to over-delete some queued threads for 
> questions I asked.]
>
> Is anyone using  ionice  for commflagging? I Googled and read some discussion 
> of it but nothing unequivocal enough to keep me from asking the list. My TV 
> box seems to struggle when I watch a recorded program while others are 
> commflagging, especially during the watermark-finding phase at the beginning 
> of flagging, and when more than one commflag job is running. I only hit about 
> 50% CPU (already niced-d) during that, but I think it's disk priority that's 
> getting me - my machine has a single consumer-grade PATA IDE drive that I 
> have hdparm-ed for best performance. I get pauses in playback and skip-ahead 
> as the commflag seems to suck up disk attention, even though my CPU still has 
> headroom. Even with only 1 job running I can tell when it's in the initial 
> phase.
>
> Thanks!
> _______________________________________________
> mythtv-users mailing list
> mythtv-users at mythtv.org
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>   


-- 
==
Ubuntu Feisty 7.04
MythTV SVN version below
AMD 64 x2 4200+ 65W Energy Efficient Processor
Abit NF-N2 nView Motherboard
NVidia 6150 video VGA/DVI
PVR-500 (Phillips Chipset)
 IVTV 0.10.4
HDHomerun /sys/version 20071120
1GB RAM
2- 500GB Seagate SATA: ST3500641AS
SONY DVD RW AW-G170A
------------------------------------------
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MythTV Version   : 16312M
MythTV Branch    : trunk
Library API      : 0.21.20080224-1
Network Protocol : 40
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