[mythtv-users] "watch recordings" menu -- 900 program limit?, and slow to generate

Eric Wemhoff ericlw at hotpop.com
Wed Nov 19 13:34:26 EST 2003


I've got 923 recorded programs right now.  In mythfrontend when I
"watch recordings" and it makes the menu of recordings, the latest
ones, starting with recording number 901, 902, etc, are getting put in
the wrong place.  Instead of at the top of the list where they belong
they're actually getting listed towards the end (but not quite at the
very end).  It's this way in the "All Programs" list, as well as the
individual shows lists.  The number 900 seems to be important; if I
delete one of the earlier shows then the previously 901st show, now
900th, starts being put in the correct spot, but the previously 902nd,
now 901st, is still wrong.  I can't find anything weird in the
"recorded" table after a cursory inspection on the mysql command line.

Does anyone else see this?  Anyone else have > 900 recordings?  Is it
something particular to me?

So these days rather than scrolling thru 900+ programs to find ones
that were recorded recently I'm using mysql to find them, and then I
go rooting thru the misordered menus to find the program I want to
watch once I know it's there and roughly where it is.

While I'm on the subject of the recorded programs menu, on my machine
with my admittedly large collection of recorded programs it takes a
little over 10 seconds to generate the menu, with a respectable
processor and no other noteworthy processes running.  10 seconds is a
long time, especially considering it redoes this whenever you either
select "watch recordings", stop watching a recording, or delete a
recording.  It would be a lot more pleasant if this process was
faster, I'm wondering how to speed it up.  I haven't read any of the
source (sorry), does anyone know what the CPU cycles are being spent
on?  For one it doesn't seem linear with the number of recordings;
back when I had a measly 200 it seemed it was already taking maybe 5
seconds.  Is most of the time for sorting the shows?  Making a bitmap
for each show's line in the menu?  If it's the former I don't have any
immediate ideas.  If it's the latter and if it would make a meaningful
difference I might propose storing that information in the database so
it doesn't have to be recomputed every time (the driving principle
here being that time is expensive, disk space is cheap).  I could
maybe think of a few other ideas, especially if I knew a little more
about what it does currently, but probably none quite as simple.
Probably ideas along the lines of keeping track of the incremental
change in the "recorded" database since the last time the menus were
made so it wouldn't have to regenerate the menu from scratch each
time.

some of my setup: gentoo, mythtv-0.11, P4b 2.5GHz, 512MB.

And lest it sound like I do nothing but complain .. I've been using
mythtv about 4 months and I think it's fantastic.  It'd be awful hard
to get 923 recordings onto a Tivo, hard to change the fontsize in the
menus, hard to edit the descriptions of recorded shows, ...

-Eric



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