[mythtv-users] Faster CPU and more RAM in SD frontend or backend?

[Johnny Russ]

>
> I agree with making the P3 the backend, although 384MB is on the low
> end, it should be OK.  It depends on how many tuners you have and
> whether you will have anything else running on the box.


I just have one tuner and I don't plan on adding anymore any time soon.


>
>
> Stuffing 4 drives in the case, make sure there is  good airflow over
> those drives.
>
> With 2x160GB and 2x250GB drives, will you make a 4x160 RAID5 or RAID0?
>

Yeah I was a little worried about heat. Maybe its time to cut a fan hole in
the side of my case. I think I am going to go with RAID5. The 160 GB drives
are getting old and I imagine one of them is going to go eventually

My dedicated backend has 2 x P3 600Mhz with 589MB of RAM, and a SCSI 6 x
> 181GB software RAID 5.  Recording two streams simultaneously, the RAID5
> process never goes above 5%.
>

Thanks for this info. I couldn't find a good reference for cpu usage.

>
> Transcoding is usually done as a user job, setup in the backend.  I
> think people may have setup a tuner-less slave backend on their
> frontends to do this sort of thing, but I have no experience myself.
>
> I was thinking about doing this, but I wasn't sure if the overhead of the
transfers is worth the gain in transcoding speed. I'm inclined to think it
would be better to let the job run slowly on the backend rather than sending
over 802.11g to the frontend. Can a frontend do transcoding or do you need
to install a slave backend?

Thanks for all the input. I didn't want to go through all the work of
setting it up just to find out that things did perform well.
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