[mythtv-users] Re: Dying Backend

Larry Taub larryt at gmail.com
Tue May 17 16:24:36 UTC 2005


I am right there with you Gavin. I have been experiencing the same problems 
as you report. I had not noticed the correlation with the database writing 
but I hadn't looked for it either. I have noticed many crashes directly 
relating to scheduling recordings in Mythweb. Also, I recorded about 10 
hours worth of tv yesterday and it worked fine then all of a sudden, it 
crashed on an evening recording. When I woke up this morning, I saw that it 
recorded two late night shows fine and was still running but then it crashed 
on a morning show today. I took the opportunity to upgrade to .18.1 and have 
restarted it. When looking at the logs, nothing seems amiss even when I 
turned up the logging verbosity to all. It just shows that recording is 
starting and then the log ends. I tried turning off the commercial flagging 
while it records and it still crashed. To give another data point, I am 
running off the atrpms install of mythtv. 

Larry

I know, these always seem to be a problem. My problem seems to be that 
anytime a job is run that requires write access to the database 
(specifically when scheduling shows or when deleting a previous recording) 
quite often the mythbackend will simply up and die. I've checked the logs 
and nothing seems amiss... since I use binary packages is there a way I can 
up the verbosity of these logs to see if anything weird is going on?

Another time the backend dies is if I've been using Mythweb, that seems to 
cause more crashes than it's sometimes worth (though I do prefer using 
Mythweb to locate shows that I want to record).

One other I've noticed is that occasionally the backend will also die upon 
completing a recording. Now, since I've tuned my recording settings recently 
I no longer transcode, I leave my recordings as mpeg2, so obviously the 
problem is occurring right at the moment that it should be starting to 
commercial flag those shows (I run automatically in my recordings). It's 
very inconsistent though, and in the logs I never see the commflag starting 
at all, just showing the Mythbackend restarting (I have a job that checks 
every minute if the process is running and restarts it if not). Of course, 
this means that I have to manually schedule the commflag job, but once I do 
that it works fine. I'd say the commflag works fine about 85% of the time, 
just sometimes it completely fails. Note that stuff recorded from 
commercial-free channels never seems to cause a mythbackend crash, so I 
think I'm pretty safe saying it's the commflagging.

Currently I'd say I lose backend about twice per day on average at the 
moment. Version 0.18.0 (not had time to do 0.18.1, but doesn't seem like it 
fixes any backend or commflag bugs).

Any thoughts?
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