[mythtv-users] Are there any throttling features in Mythtv?

[Mike Perkins]

Sunday evening, we sat down to watch a film I'd recorded just before Christmas, 
2 hours long. This was about 7:45 pm. An hour and a half later, the whole system 
hung. There was not the slightest sign that anything was wrong up to the point 
it froze.

After some investigation of the front end[1] I discovered that the back end had 
hung. This was because at 8:55 pm the back end had begun three simultaneous 
recordings on three DVB-T tuners. Apparently my back end couldn't cope with 
reading and writing four streams simultaneously[2].

Now, before you all scream "throw more hardware at it!" I would like to point 
out that whatever system you've got, a point will come when you are likely to 
stress it. So it occurred to me to wonder if there was any kind of throttling or 
warning available in mythtv, apart from "max # of jobs to run on this backend".

For example, if I were to play a long film that happened to overlap a period of 
heavy recording, would it be possible for the system to say something like "this 
probably isn't a good idea, go and watch something shorter"? Or for it to show 
me what's likely to happen within the playing time of the selected program?

I wouldn't want to go as far as rescheduling, but some kind of information 
screen might be useful. At the moment, to find out what's scheduled involves 
going into "schedule programs" then "upcoming recordings" to see a list, then 
backing out and going to "watch recordings" to find something to watch. Anyone 
any suggestions?

[1] see separate post. The front end was ok in this instance.
[2] recording three simultaneous streams is known to work ok. Recording 2 
streams and watching one is known to work ok.

-- 

Mike Perkins