[mythtv-users] MBE Horsepower...

Andrew Close aclose at gmail.com
Sun Jan 17 21:31:48 UTC 2010


i'm in the process of splitting my combo FE/BE system into a MBE and
an ION FE.  the machine i'm using for my MBE runs an AMD Athlon XP
1.2GHz CPU with 512MB of RAM.  while that worked fine as an SD only FE
system, it seems to be over taxed running as a MBE processing HDHR
recordings. more RAM is definitely order as top shows i'm maxing out
my RAM+swap, and possibly more CPU.  the only extra processing this
MBE does is commflagging.  in mythtv-setup i have the CPU usage set to
Low with Max simultaneous jobs = 1.  however, when recording from with
the HDHR and/or commflagging, the MBE is pretty much unresponsive, i
can't ssh into the box, mythweb doesn't return and the netboot FE
hangs until the BE is done.  i am running an X server on the MBE, but
not a FE.

did Myth 0.22 increase RAM requirements?
does commflagging HD video tax the system more than SD video?

this is more rhetorical, but is it worth upgrading the RAM in this
system (~$90 for 3GB maxing it out)?  or would that money be better
spent replacing this system with something newer?  (more power, but
less power hungry)
i know i can't buy a replacement system for $90, but getting something
else that would use less power when idle and have more power when
needed for whatever wouldn't be a bad thing.  is anyone using an Atom
N330 in their BE doing commflagging and possibly transcoding
successfully?

thanks

-- 
Andrew Close


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