[mythtv-users] When the disk is full... what happens?

[Brad Templeton]

On Wed, Jan 19, 2005 at 10:46:40AM -0500, Anthony Vito wrote:
> > Is it?  I thought it was on until my disk filled, and I found that
> > it was set to 0 as the threshold, which somewhat counterintuitively
> > disables autoexpire.   Maybe I set it that way and forgot about it, but
> > I had the same problem this guy had.
> 
> That's a tough problem. The system really can't act like you expect it
> to. The system can't run out of disk space first... then delete
> stuff... and _not_ miss recording data. The time to delete a file is
> non-zero, even if you have a solid state disk. Unless you setup a huge
> RAM cache to hold the info while the delete occurs... somehow you need
> a little cushion to make everything go smoothly ;)

Of course.  I have not looked at this code, but my understanding is
the autoexpire runs every 10 minutes, thus you want to have a buffer
zone big enough for 10 minutes and probably more -- at least 1.5gb for
HDTV, and that's cutting it fine.

I suppose perfect performance would include being able to predict
space needs from the bitrate at which you are recording, and free as
you need to, but the autoexpire works well enough.  What I was asking
was, is it possible it defaults to zero, ie. off, and this caused these
problems, or did that guy and myself accidentally set it to zero and
forget about it?