[mythtv-users] FC4 High Load Average

Christian Hack christianh at edmi.com.au
Fri Aug 5 10:00:52 UTC 2005


I recently reinstalled my system from scratch using Fedora Core 4 and
Jarod's guide (thanks Jarod). Everything installed with basically no
hitches. The machine is an XP2400 + nForce 1 motherboard + Nvidia GF 440MX
with 2 Hauppauge Nova-T DVB cards. I'm using the nvidia drivers from atrpms
and the DVB drivers which came with FC4. 3 x 120GB drives are LVMed to make
one small system partition (10GB) and one large storage partition. DMA is
definitely on on all drives.

Now when watching something and transcoding another program in the
background I'm seeing load averages up around the 4, 5 and 6 mark. 
This starts to make the playback framerate stutter a bit. Sound is
unaffected, but the picture is a bit jerky.

Just playback of a something currently recording (about 22-25% CPU) results
in peak load averages up around the 3 mark. It fluctuates anywhere between
0.5 and 3 though. No playback (but still recording) and the average drops
down to <0.1 as expected. From top:

top - 19:51:20 up 5 days, 10:55,  4 users,  load average: 2.78, 1.99, 2.07
Tasks:  97 total,   3 running,  94 sleeping,   0 stopped,   0 zombie
Cpu(s): 26.3% us,  4.3% sy,  0.7% ni, 66.1% id,  2.3% wa,  0.3% hi,  0.0% si
Mem:    515184k total,   509140k used,     6044k free,    13300k buffers
Swap:        0k total,        0k used,        0k free,   166596k cached

  PID USER      PR  NI  VIRT  RES  SHR S %CPU %MEM    TIME+  COMMAND

 2917 mythtv    15   0  353m 169m  35m S 23.9 33.7 847:10.84 mythfrontend

 2530 root      15   0  142m  69m  21m S  4.3 13.9 127:06.89 X

 2301 root      16   0  233m  25m  12m S  2.0  5.1  61:50.25 mythbackend

 2921 mythtv    25  10 35432  13m 6472 R  0.7  2.7  27:32.72 rhn-applet-gui

    1 root      16   0  1744  568  492 S  0.0  0.1   0:02.47 init

    2 root      34  19     0    0    0 S  0.0  0.0   0:00.00 ksoftirqd/0

    3 root      RT   0     0    0    0 S  0.0  0.0   0:00.00 watchdog/0

    4 root      10  -5     0    0    0 S  0.0  0.0   0:00.02 events/0

    5 root      13  -5     0    0    0 S  0.0  0.0   0:00.01 khelper

    6 root      10  -5     0    0    0 S  0.0  0.0   0:00.00 kthread

    8 root      20  -5     0    0    0 S  0.0  0.0   0:00.00 kacpid

   94 root      10  -5     0    0    0 S  0.0  0.0   0:00.02 kblockd/0

   97 root      15   0     0    0    0 S  0.0  0.0   0:00.00 khubd

  143 root      16   0     0    0    0 S  0.0  0.0   0:15.39 pdflush

  144 root      15   0     0    0    0 S  0.0  0.0   0:13.49 pdflush

  146 root      16  -5     0    0    0 S  0.0  0.0   0:00.00 aio/0


Before this I had Redhat 8.0 and was using a fairly recent CVS version of
Myth on the exact same hardware and I never saw these high load averages.

Any ideas what would cause loads this high?

Thanks
CH



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