[mythtv-users] Myth autoexpiring brand new shows

Enigma enigma at thedonnerparty.com
Tue Aug 26 05:52:20 UTC 2008


> Are you sure you are expiring programs by age (oldest first) and not
> priority (or a combination of the two)?



Yep, the autoexpire method is set to "Oldest Show First", plus the NASCAR
recordings have a higher priority than almost any other recording (which is
why I am getting so much flack over it).

It looks like the issue lies with the Storage Groups, it appears it is
expiring things as fast as it can from the 200 GB local disk and very rarely
recording anything to the 1.1 TB remote disk (or the 200 GB remote disk).
Digging deeper into Storage Groups, I discovered that the code does not try
to balance disk space, the purpose of Storage Groups is to manage disk I/O.
When the feature was first implemented there was a lot of talk about how it
would make LVM and RAIDs obsolete [even the Myth documentation says this]
for Myth systems but that is not at all what it is for -- it appears that if
you want your recordings to be evenly spread across your disks (and not
immediately deleted) you still need to concatenate your disks using
traditional methods.  I sure wish I knew this before storage groups
effectively turned my 1.5 TB system into a 200 GB system and deleted all my
new recordings.

In my opinion, Myth should prefer to record to the disk that has free space
or can create free space by autoexpiring the first item (or at least
something in the top n items) on the autoexpire list.  It makes no sense to
automatically delete brand new recordings when there are so many older
recordings just because a certain disk is coming up with a higher SG
priority number.

For the time being I think I should be able to work around the issue using
the [undocumented...of course!] SGweightPerDir setting.  This won't
eliminate the problem, but at least I can force Myth to record to my big
disk rather than only using 200 GB.  I certainly can't be the only person
that uses a combination of local and remote disks for Myth, I am a little
suprised that I haven't seen this issue discussed on the list before.
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