[mythtv-users] Massive HDD activity at show starts

Richard Shaw hobbes1069 at gmail.com
Thu Jun 3 15:00:38 UTC 2010


On Thu, Jun 3, 2010 at 4:17 AM, Jan Schneider <jan at horde.org> wrote:
> Hi,
>
> I'm experiencing something in 23-fixes that didn't happen with 22-fixes and
> seems to be worse when wathing HD channels:
> if watching LiveTV, when one shows ends and the next one starts, there is so
> much (audible) HDD activity (i.e. probably seek operations), that a lot of
> frames are dropped (from current LiveTV as well as recordings that happen at
> the same time). Sometimes up to one or two seconds are missing. In the worst
> case the FE is so much off the track, that I have constant audio pauses
> until I restart LiveTV.
>
> This is a combined BE/FE with XFS for recordings and ext3 for anything else.
>
> I'm wondering:
> - What is causing this much activity? There should be just 2 or 3 DB INSERTs
> beside the regular recording activities, right?
> - Why is this happening now?
> - How can fix this, or at least track the cause further down?

I am having a problem that may be tangentially related. Ever since
upgrading to 0.23, I'm having problems with keyframe indexes being
off. I have a recording drive (EXT4) separate from the system (&
database) drive, so that shouldn't be a problem and a relatively fast
system: AMD X2 2.4GHz (Socket AM2). Sometimes I can't skip forward or
backward without locking up the video or skipping much more than the
30 sec it's supposed to. Doing an MPEG2->MPEG2 transcode with keyframe
index rebuild usually fixes it but one time it even made it worse. A
one hour show only displayed the first 2:26 minutes on the OSD and I
could not skip past that point, but if I left it alone it would
continue to play. Transcoding a second time fixed it.

I remember seeing some errors in the log that I think had to do with
preview generation, several for the same recording in fact now that I
think about it.

Anyone have any suggestions for a workaround? I have no problem filing
a bug report but I'm not even sure what it would say at this point.

Richard


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