[mythtv-users] Shows Chopped Up and Long Queue of Comm Flag / Metadata Jobs

[Gary Buhrmaster]

On Tue, Aug 6, 2013 at 2:36 PM, George Galt <george.galt at gmail.com> wrote:
....
> In defense of process monitors, I run one not because myth is unreliable,
> but because it is so reliable that it may take several days or more before I
> notice it isn't running -- by which time I've missed a few of my wife's
> favorite programs.  Since I don't watch TV every night (or sometimes for
> more than a week, even when home), I can't otherwise monitor the system.  Do
> you have any other suggestions if a process monitor isn't the preferred
> strategy?

Monitoring is not (itself) a bad thing.  However, what you do about
a failure detection is important.  I know the common "Windows user"
approach is to reboot, and hope the problem goes away.  It might
(especially with commodity hardware that occasionally just
fails in unusual ways) but you have not addressed the root cause.
The reality is that MythTV has bugs(*).  To improve MythTV, there
needs to be reliable and useful (and hopefully repeatable) reports
of problems.

So, rather than just restarting your current release(**) MythTV,
why not have your monitoring system perform the appropriate
debugging steps as as documented at http://www.mythtv.org/wiki/Debugging
so that bugs can be reported, and fixed?  Note that for the
backtrace to be really useful, you will need to install the debug
symbols.  Except in the most extremely storage constrained
system, installing the debug symbols is a no-brainer.  Just
install them, and have your package system maintain them
as you upgrade so you will have them when you need them.

Gary

(*) There have been great strides over the last few development
cycles to eliminate deadlocks and to deal with potential errors
detected by static analysis, along with the usual bug fixes.  But
there is always more to do, and MythTV is a very complex piece
of software, not all code paths have been extensively tested.
And any complex piece of code has bugs.

(**) If you are running older releases, first move to the current
release.  As stated above, many fixes go in at each release,
and the devs do not have the resources to deal with bugs that
have already been fixed in later releases.